Introduction, Miles Leeson with Emma V. Miller
Part I: Behind closed doors
1. Text, image, audience: Adaptation and reception of Andrea Newman’s A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969) – Frances Pheasant-Kelly
2. Assuming a ‘manly position’: The crisis of masculinity in Ian McEwan’s early fiction – Justine Gieni
3. ‘Waking in the dark’: Remembering incest in A Thousand Acres (1991), Exposure (1993) and Beautiful Kate (2009) – Rebecca White
Part II: Incest and the child protagonist
4. ‘The word is incest’: Narrative, affect and judgement in and across the Lolitas – Matthew Pateman
5. Appropriate or anathema? The representation of incest in children’s literature – Alice Mills
6. ‘[B]orn to make a real life, however it cracks your heart’: creative women and daydreaming in Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2008) – Emma V. Miller
Part III: Incest as a political conceit
7. The desire for power and the power of desire: The case of Pier Paolo Pasolini – Michael Mack
8. ‘Our close but prohibited union’: Sibling incest, class and national identity in Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) – Robert Duggan
9. Is posthuman incest possible? Science fiction and the futures of the body – Alistair Brown
Part IV: The rhetoric of narrating incest
10. ‘Is’t not a kind of incest?’ Metaphor and relation in the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – Charles Mundye
11. ‘[T]he thing that makes us different from other people’: Narrating incest through ‘différance’ in the work of Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt and Doris Lessing – Emma V. Miller and Miles Leeson
12. Avuncular ambiguity: Ethical virtue in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (1954) – Miles Leeson
Index