Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Tanner deals with the central question of all narrative texts: how the reader is manipulated into empathy or distance by the text… . This study … is the sort that needs to be redone in every classroom and by every mature reader… . Tanner offers provocative and useful discussions of rape and torture …
-Choice

This thoughtful and disturbing book raises serious questions about ‘the consequences … of reading representations of rape and torture.’
-American Literature

In this incisive exploration of twentieth-century novels, art, and ads, Laura Tanner explains the mechanisms by which reader and viewer are implicated in violence. Equally effective as a challenge to textual assault is the grace and gentleness of Tanner’s own prose. Intimate Violence signals the emergence of an astute and humane critical voice. -Wendy Steiner

Through an examination of such notorious works as The White Hotel and American Psycho, Laura Tanner leads us in a disturbing exploration of the reader’s complicity with fictional depictions of intimate violence.