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This is the first edited collection of essays which focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day; it considers a number of authors rather than a single author from this period. This study discusses the impact of this change in attitudes on literature and literary adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth century, and early years of the twenty-first century. Although primarily concerned with fiction, the collection includes work on television and film. This collection will enhance the growing academic interest in trauma narratives and taboo-literature, offering a useful contribution to a fast-evolving field of artistic criticism which is concerned with the relationship between social issues and creativity. Authors discussed include Iain Banks, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Newman and Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath.
This study brings out the norms and culturally dependent values that formed the
basis of the theoretical regulation and the practical handling of incest cases
in Sweden 1680–1940, situating this development in a wider European context. It
discusses a broad variety of general human subjects that are as important today
as they were hundreds of years ago, such as love, death, family relations,
religion, crimes, and punishments.
By analysing criminal-case material and
applications for dispensation, as well as political and legislative sources, the
incest phenomenon is explored from different perspectives over a long time
period. It turns out that although the incest debate has been dominated by
religious, moral, and later medical beliefs, ideas about love, age, and family
hierarchies often influenced the assessment of individual incest cases. These
unspoken values could be decisive – sometimes life-determining – for the outcome
of various incest cases.
The book will interest scholars from several
different fields of historical research, such as cultural history, the history
of crime and of sexuality, family history, history of kinship, and historical
marriage patterns. The long time period also broadens the number of potential
readers. Since the subject concerns general human issues that are as current
today as they were three centuries ago, the topic will also appeal to a
non-academic audience.
5 Incest and immorality Introduction 1884, the Recorder of Dublin commented with regard to the case of a fiftyyear-old man charged with ‘assault to ravish his daughter’: 1 [T]his was one of the worst cases ever proven in a Criminal Court. On submitted evidence this man was proven to have committed an act of violence, an unnatural offence on his own child, a girl of fourteen. The circumstances were unspeakably shocking. The prisoner should have been sentenced to penal servitude for life.2 The man received two years’ imprisonment in separate confinement; but
inhabit and, most significantly for the context of the present book, our familial and sexual relations. 3 This chapter looks towards the futures of incest through the lens of science fiction. By examining the depiction of incest in three narratives concerned with different posthuman technologies of reproduction and embodiment – androids ( Abiogenesis ), genetic cloning ( Plan for Chaos ), and artificial
Incest in Lolita is manifested in two different forms. The first is, within the fictional world, what may be deemed incest by marriage. Humbert Humbert marries Charlotte Haze and begins a sexual affair with her daughter, now his step-daughter. That this is paedophilic as well as legally incestuous is something made very clear in both film versions (Stanley Kubrick’s, released in 1962, set in
This book demonstrates that incest was representative of a range of interests crucial to writers of the Gothic, often women or homosexual men who adopted a critical stance in relation to the heteronormative patriarchal world. In repositioning the Gothic, representations of incest are revealed as synonymous with the Gothic as a whole. The book argues that extending the traditional endpoint of the Gothic makes it possible to understand the full range of familial, legal, marital, sexual and class implications associated with the genre's deployment of incest. Gothic authors deploy the generic convention of incest to reveal as inadequate heteronormative ideologies of sexuality and desire in the patriarchal social structure that render its laws and requirements arbitrary. The book examines the various familial ties and incestuous relationships in the Gothic to show how they depict and disrupt contemporary definitions of gender, family and desire. Many of the methodologies adopted in Gothic scholarship and analyses of incest reveal ongoing continuities between their assumptions and those of the very ideologies Gothic authors strove to disrupt through their use of the incest trope. Methodologies such as Freudian psychoanalysis, as Botting argues, can be positioned as a product of Gothic monster-making, showing the effect of Gothic conventions on psychoanalytic theories that are still in wide use today.
thinking entailed changes in the status of religious and moral crimes. They were still believed to have a detrimental influence on society from a moral perspective; but, for all that, they were less serious than crimes aimed directly at the state or the individual. The set penalties could therefore be reduced. 13 The Penal Act of 1864 abolished the death penalty for incest, replacing it with hard labour. As was pointed out above, several incest prohibitions had been questioned in repeated parliamentary
order to increase one's network of loyal allies. The other strategy focuses on preserving property and capital within one's own group through strategic marriages within the family. 9 The latter strategy has often been linked to social groups with major property holdings; for instance, the nobility or, during later periods, the emerging middle classes. Within anthropology, such marriage patterns are referred to as ‘exogamous’ and ‘endogamous’, respectively, and they have often been seen as relevant to how incest
Gustav III, who had come into contact with the philosophical ideas of the French Enlightenment in his youth, made a few attempts at reform in the 1770s. Among other things, he forbade torture in connection with interrogations and attempted to abolish the death penalty for incest crimes. However, this proposal met with fierce resistance from the estates of the realm with the justification that the crime was in opposition to God's law. 5 Thus, the death penalty remained in force until 1864 for the closest relationships in
22 Incest, penance and a murdered bishop: the legend of Frederic of Utrecht Bram van den Hoven van Genderen The title of this contribution refers to the early-eleventh-century Passio Friderici.1 In this saint’s life bishop Frederic of Utrecht (fl. c. 822/26–34) is murdered by a couple of minions of Empress Judith, wife of Emperor Louis the Pious, out of revenge for the bishop’s accusations of incest and adultery against her. Moreover, incest was involved in a double sense. Judith’s presumed lover, Count Bernard of Septimania, was, according to the Passio, also