This is the first edited collection of essays which focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day; including 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.