The Literary Legacy of Child Sexual Abuse: Psychoanalytic Readings of an American Tradition [Hardcover]

It examines the representation of child sexual abuse in five American novels written from 1850 to the present. Legal and therapeutic interventions respond with their disciplinary resources to these questions as they concern victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Literary criticism offers another analytic framework

Beverly Haviland is a Visiting Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Henry Jamess Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene and the editor of The Sense of the Past in The Complete Fiction of Henry James.

A Personal Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reading Stories, Asking Questions

Chapter 1: Telling in Her Own Time: Shame and the Delay of Disclosure in The Scarlet Letter

Chapter 2: Loose Screws and Loose Ends: The Value of Uncertainty in The Turn of the Screw

Chapter 3: Parody, Perversion, and Pedophilia: Consent and the Pornography of Art in Lolita

Chapter 4: The Colors of Shame: Varieties of Racism in The Bluest Eye

Chapter 5: The Wound and the Blessing: Witnessing for One and for All in Gilead

Afterword: What Fiction Can Do for Life

Index

This book examines the representation of child sexual abuse in five American novels written from 1850 to the present. The historical range of the novels shows that child sexual abuse is not a new problem, although it has been called bls