Incest, so Brian Connolly argues in his lucid and enlightening new monograph, has quite a history in the United States. Far from being universal and ahistorical in its prohibition, incest lay “at the heart of … the emergent figures of liberalism and the liberal subject” (4) and is deeply implicated in the history of modernity. Whether taken as synonymous with rape, paedophilia, or domestic violence, or as the dangerous limit of such concepts as “sentimentalism, consent and affection” (3, original emphasis), discussions of incest (or, more accurately, the incest threat and the incest prohibition) emerged in the context of “the constant movement between the public world of markets, politics, and sociality and the private life of the family” (3) that defined nineteenth-century US political culture. Indeed, the very erosion of religious law that gave birth to the modern liberal subject precipitated a new set of concerns around the potential of that subject, who was now idealized as a free individual who operated according to their own desires and affections, to engage in incestuous relationships that were no longer governed by the “Anglican interpretation of the Levitical prohibition” (5). The issue was further heightened by the rise of sentimentalism as a key component of nineteenth-century American nationalism. Instead of religious law solely, families were now meant to regulate the erotic desires of their members by means of “affection,” yet just how affectionate was a family meant to be? As Connolly shows, in the wake of the Revolution there were numerous discussions in the areas of literature, theology, law, reproductive health, slavery and anthropology over what precisely defined, and prohibited, incest. What is compelling about his findings is how often these discourses fail to reach the same conclusions about the acceptability or desirability of incestuous practices. Taking each of these areas separately, Connolly offers a “genealogy” (itself a term lexically related to consanguinity) of incest prohibition that seeks to extricate research on family sexuality from the “search for origins” that has defined much “anthropological, sociological, psychoanalytic, and sociobiological” (4) work on the subject since the later nineteenth century. That is, following Michel Foucault's lead, Connolly makes a special claim for literature and history as tools for denaturalizing sets of behaviours often coded as natural and universal.

One especially effective example the author offers of this crisis is the so-called “marriage question” that was prominent in early nineteenth-century theological and doctrinal debate in popular print and at the pulpit. Put simply, the question was this: was it incest to marry your dead wife's sister? This seems perhaps like a small issue when compared with other subjects raised in the book (patriarchal rape of children, the use of incest in “slave breeding,” the birth of psychoanalysis etc.), yet it is a surprisingly rich area of inquiry. “While theologians from various Reformed denominations, particularly Presbyterian, Congregational, and Dutch Reformed, occupied various positions,” Connolly writes, “taken as a whole the marriage question produced a highly erotic sentimental family and desiring liberal subject, both marked by incest” (52). That is to say, the very discourses of affection, love and consent that were designed to regulate male erotic desire and allow for political stability in the new nation often created the very crises they sought to ameliorate. To marry one's dead wife's sister is to preserve the security and stability of the family unit against intrusion from outside forces – and includes no threat of sex with blood kin – yet it technically constituted incest in some quarters and so strained the limits of modern sentimentality.

The structure of the book works well in demonstrating chronological changes around the subject of incest – a move from questions of marriage to sex, from kinship to the medical discourse of heredity and the health of offspring – and throws up some interesting insights. For example, the chapter on reproduction considers in detail the prehistory of phrenology to the modern emergence of psychoanalysis. Connolly cleverly demonstrates the way that the phrenological imperative to use the family as a source for the healthy development of “amativeness” in the modern individual helped lay the groundwork for the Freudian position on Oedipal relations and depth psychology. The only discipline given short shrift is anthropology, to which only a shortish epilogue is devoted. The reason for this is certainly to do with how dominant that discipline has been in considerations of the subject in the past and the author's wish to move beyond Lewis Henry Morgan's famous work on “promiscuous intercourse” and evolutionary social development. Regrettably for literary scholars, the first chapter, in which Connolly discusses Poe, The Newgate Calendar and the fictional Life of Dr. Richard Jennings, The Great Victimizer, is promising, but, ultimately, the weakest section overall. One never gets a clear sense of the place of incest narratives within the genre of sentimental fiction, or the readership of such narrative. However, the monograph is an essential piece of reading for any literary scholars or historians interested in the constitution of the family in the nineteenth-century US and can be expected to lead to more nuanced work in a variety of subdisciplines in the near future.