In this imaginative and provocative study, the relationship between gender, incest and fiction is explored through a series of cultural, materialist and psychoanalytic readings of texts.
Alison Stenton Times Literary Supplement 2004 Pollak's remarkable book has qualities typical of the best scholarly criticism: a thorough and assured grasp of the history and current discussions of the topic; the capacity ... Read moreto forcefully assert its own place in those discussions; and elegant movement between close readings and broader implications. Choice 2004 Pollak writes with clarity, conviction, and precision; she has authored a brilliant book, and literary studies will be richer for it.
Alison Conway Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2005 Pollak's book is well worth reading for its illuminating analyses of individual novels; but it also does modern women a real service by using these close readings to denaturalize our false, present-day assumptions about incest.
Eve Tavor South Atlantic Review 2005 Pollak succeeds in reading dialectically the discourse of sex, race, and class in the eighteenth-century novel, skillfully avoiding the traps of reifying categories.
Ros Ballaster Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 2006 The reading is illuminating, perhaps paradigm-altering... This book should change the way we think about fiction in the future. Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography 2007 Show Less