1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910780973803321

Autore

Harkins Gillian

Titolo

Everybody's family romance [[electronic resource] ] : reading incest in neoliberal America / / Gillian Harkins

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Minneapolis, : University of Minnesota Press, 2009

ISBN

0-8166-7057-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (338 p.)

Disciplina

810.9/3538

Soggetti

American literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Incest in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Preface: Nobody's home -- Introduction: Everybody's family romance --  Laying down the law: the modernization of American incest -- Legal fantasies: populist trauma and the theater of memory -- Seduction by literature: sexual property and testimonial possession --  Surviving the family romance? Realism and the labor of incest -- Consensual relations: the scattered generations of kinship -- Conclusion: beyond the incest taboo

Sommario/riassunto

In the 1990's, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody's Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century. Harkins's interdisciplinary approach reveals how women's narratives about incest were co-opted by-and yet retained resistant strains against-the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. A