The Stuttering Son: A Literary Study of Boys and Their Fathers examines stuttering, a condition which overwhelmingly affects boys, in terms of the complex relationships a number of male authors have had with their fathers. Most of these writers, from Cotton Mather to John Updike, were themselves stutterers; for two others, Melville and Kafka, the focus shifts to how similar family tensions contributed to their interest in the related condition of anorexia. A final section looks at the patricidal impulse lurking behind much of this analysis, as evident in Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Nietzsche. By focusing on the issue of a boy's emotional development, this book attempts to re-establish the value of a broadly psychological approach to understanding stuttering.

This book considers major male writers from the last three centuries whose relation to a strong, often distant woman-one sometimes modeled on their own mother-forms the romantic core of their greatest narratives. Myron Tuman explores the theory that there is an underlying psychological type, the sensitive son, connecting these otherwise diverse writers. The volume starts and ends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions provides an early portrait of one such son. There are chapters on other adoring sons, Stendhal, Sacher-Masoch, Scott Fitzgerald, and Turgenev, as well as on sons like Bernard Shaw and D.H. Lawrence with a different, less affectionate psychological disposition toward women. This book demonstrates how, despite many differences, the best works of all these sensitive sons reflect the deep, contorted nature of their desire, a longing that often seems less for an actual woman than for an elusive feminine ideal.

This book considers major male writers from the last three centuries whose relation to a strong, often distant woman-one sometimes modeled on their own mother-forms the romantic core of their greatest narratives. Myron Tuman explores the theory that there is an underlying psychological type, the sensitive son, connecting these otherwise diverse writers. The volume starts and ends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions provides an early portrait of one such son. There are chapters on other adoring sons, Stendhal, Sacher-Masoch, Scott Fitzgerald, and Turgenev, as well as on sons like Bernard Shaw and D.H. Lawrence with a different, less affectionate psychological disposition toward women. This book demonstrates how, despite many differences, the best works of all these sensitive sons reflect the deep, contorted nature of their desire, a longing that often seems less for an actual woman than for an elusive feminine ideal.

Don Juan and His Daughter is a study of the creative power of illicit desire. While Melville's Gay Father dealt with fathers' erotic feelings for their sons, here Tuman ventures into the realm of female longing. In sections one and three, the focus is on women's romantic feelings for their own fathers or male stand-ins: in works by Edith Wharton, Anais Nin, Joyce Carol Oates as well as Freud's study of Dora; and then in novels by Elizabeth Inchbald, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, as well as memoirs of Kathryn Harrison. In section two, the focus shifts to the desire for an otherwise unavailable partner: in Emily Bronte, for an avenging brother; in Charlotte Bronte, for a misogynistic mentor; in George Eliot and Olive Schreiner, for an aloof female beauty. The books thus attempts to see the role incestuous desire plays within the imaginative process, or, as Tuman says in The Preface, "to draw as close as possible to the white-heat of literary creation, without ourselves being singed."