Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature

This interdisciplinary study rereads father-daughter incest narratives of the last hundred years to argue for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. Contributing to the work of the second-wave of trauma theory, this book responds in part to the psychological community, which failed to include complex PTSD in the DSM-5.