The Literary Legacy of Child Sexual Abuse

Psychoanalytic Readings of an American Tradition

Beverly Haviland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781032023021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000898880
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 by other names in other eras. The introduction explains what literature and literary criticism bring to persistent questions that arise when children are sexually abused. Psychoanalytic concepts developed by Freud, Ferenczi, Kohut, and Lacan inform readings of the novels. Theories of trauma, shame, psychosis, and perversion provide insights into the characters represented in the stories. Each chapter is guided by a difficult question that has arisen from real-life situations of child sexual abuse. These are previewed in the "Personal Preface" and "Introduction" and succinctly reviewed in the "Afterword" that weaves the chapters together. Legal and therapeutic interventions respond with their disciplinary resources to the questions as they concern victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Literary criticism offers another analytic framework that can significantly inform those responses.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Personal Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Reading Stories, Asking Questions
• 1 Telling in Her Own Time Shame and the Delay of Disclosure in The Scarlet Letter
• 2 Loose Screws and Loose Ends The Value of Uncertainty in The Turn of the Screw
• 3 Parody, Perversion, and Pedophilia Consent and the Pornography of Art in Lolita
• 4 The Colors of Shame Varieties of Racism in The Bluest Eye
• 5 The Wound and the Blessing Witnessing for One and for All in Gilead
• Afterword What Fiction Can Do for Life
• Index