This collection of essays focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day. The collection exposes the wide use of incest and sexual trauma, and the frequency this appears within contemporary literature and related arts. Although primarily concerned with fiction, the collection includes work on television and film. Authors discussed include Iain Banks, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Newman and Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath.