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Article: Incest, Sexuality, and Modernity
- Article from:
- Novel
- Article date:
- April 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Novel, Inc. Spring 2005. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Incest, Sexuality, and Modernity ELLEN POLLAK, Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003), pp. 280, hardcover, $39.95
Incest narratives abound in the eighteenth century. So it is strange that their significance has remained largely unexplored within literary scholarship. Part of the reason for this, as Ellen Pollak explains in Incest and the Novel, her path-breaking book and the first monograph the topic has attracted, is that we are accustomed to thinking about incest anachronistically. On the one hand, she argues, we see incest as the forbidden desire lurking at the heart of modern sexuality-a legacy of Romanticism. On the other, we see the prohibition of ...