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. Legal and therapeutic interventions respond with their disciplinary resources to these questions as they concern victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Literary criticism offers another analytic framework that can significantly inform those responses.

In this 1998 study of Henry James's classic text of cultural criticism, The American Scene, Beverly Haviland shows how James confronted the vexing problem of making sense of the past so that he could make culture work. In this record of James's 1904-5 return to America and in his unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, he interpreted the social conflicts that seemed to be paralysing relations between men and women, between black and white Americans, between 'natives' and 'aliens', between defenders of taste and censors of waste. Although James has been represented as conservative by liberal critics, it is just such simplifying oppositions that his method of interpretation works to transform. Haviland's own metonymical method follows James's interpretative practice by bringing historical and theoretical readings of these texts into conversation with each other.

In this 1998 study of Henry James's classic text of cultural criticism, The American Scene, Beverly Haviland shows how James confronted the vexing problem of making sense of the past so that he could make culture work. In this record of James's 1904-5 return to America and in his unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, he interpreted the social conflicts that seemed to be paralysing relations between men and women, between black and white Americans, between 'natives' and 'aliens', between defenders of taste and censors of waste. Although James has been represented as conservative by liberal critics, it is just such simplifying oppositions that his method of interpretation works to transform. Haviland's own metonymical method follows James's interpretative practice by bringing historical and theoretical readings of these texts into conversation with each other.