Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814

From the inadvertent marriage of a brother and sister in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders to the sexually charged intrafamilial relationships in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, a remarkable number of English novels written between 1684 and 1814 predicate their plots on the tabooed possibility of incest. In the first full-length study to examine the striking prevalence of such plots in early English novels, Ellen Pollak focuses on literary representations...