Rethinking Romantic Incest
Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4909342 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alan Richardson (0000-0001-8931-2518, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2000 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 553-572 |
| Publication date | 2000-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/nlh.2000.0038 |
| OpenAlex | W2006002951 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 10 |
Incest--or rather, the avoidance of incest--has struck a number of influential thinkers as providing the key to understanding human culture. Frazer made the universality of the incest prohibition central to his demonstration of deep similarities among so-called primitive and modern cultures alike in his 1910 study, Totemism and Exogamy. Freud went further and made the repression or sublimation of incestuous desires crucial both for the development of individual psychic life and for the rise of human society in works like Totem and Taboo. Levi-Strauss, in Elementary Structures of Kinship, made the incest prohibition the "fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture is accomplished." 1 Over the past decade, the ubiquity of incest avoidance has proved no less significant for those seeking to establish the biological foundations of culture, or to call the distinction between nature and culture radically into question. In Human Universals, Donald E. Brown presents the Darwinian approach to the universality, "or near-universality," of the incest taboo as an exemplary case of how biological anthropology should best be theorized and empirically tested. 2 Steven Pinker, distilling the new field of evolutionary psychology for popular consumption in How the Mind Works, includes an anti-Freudian account of incest avoidance that covers much of the same ground as Brown. 3 Illustrating his theory of "gene-culture co-evolution," E. O. Wilson, the founder of "sociobiology," presents still another, updated version of the evolutionary theory of incest avoidance in his recent book Consilience. 4
Evolutionary psychology · Evolutionism · Exogamy · Freudian slip · Problem of universals · Psychic · Sociobiology · Taboo · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2023 (22) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |