J. Brooks Bouson is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother and Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, both also published by SUNY Press.

"Bouson attracts immediate attention with her compelling title. After a tight introduction, the author offers chapters on works worthy of intense critical analysis … Throughout, Bouson provides clear considerations of where and how these works will extend the discourse of shame theory, which is a relatively new area of scholarly work." — CHOICE

• Acknowledgments1. IntroductionPart I: Coming of Age, Coming to Shame: The Parental and Cultural Transmission of Sexual, Racial, and Class Shame 2. The Humiliations of the Female Flesh in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women3. Family Violence, Incest, and White-Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina4. Racial Self-Loathing and the Color Complex in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun5. Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory6. Coming of Age in a Culture of Shame in Naomi Wolf’s PromiscuitiesPart II: Speaking a Kind of Body Language: Shamed Bodies and Spoiled Identities in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances 7. Feeling Fat, Fearing Fat in Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story8. The Culture of Appearances and the Socially Invisible and Unattractive Woman in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil9. Gerontophobia and the Cultural Shaming of the Elderly Woman in May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel10. Writing the Disfi gured and Disabled Body-Self in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World11. In ConclusionNotesWorks CitedIndex

J. Brooks Bouson is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother and Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, both also published by SUNY Press.

"Bouson attracts immediate attention with her compelling title. After a tight introduction, the author offers chapters on works worthy of intense critical analysis … Throughout, Bouson provides clear considerations of where and how these works will extend the discourse of shame theory, which is a relatively new area of scholarly work." — CHOICE

• Acknowledgments1. IntroductionPart I: Coming of Age, Coming to Shame: The Parental and Cultural Transmission of Sexual, Racial, and Class Shame 2. The Humiliations of the Female Flesh in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women3. Family Violence, Incest, and White-Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina4. Racial Self-Loathing and the Color Complex in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun5. Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory6. Coming of Age in a Culture of Shame in Naomi Wolf’s PromiscuitiesPart II: Speaking a Kind of Body Language: Shamed Bodies and Spoiled Identities in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances 7. Feeling Fat, Fearing Fat in Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story8. The Culture of Appearances and the Socially Invisible and Unattractive Woman in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil9. Gerontophobia and the Cultural Shaming of the Elderly Woman in May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel10. Writing the Disfi gured and Disabled Body-Self in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World11. In ConclusionNotesWorks CitedIndex

J. Brooks Bouson is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother and Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, both also published by SUNY Press.

"Bouson attracts immediate attention with her compelling title. After a tight introduction, the author offers chapters on works worthy of intense critical analysis … Throughout, Bouson provides clear considerations of where and how these works will extend the discourse of shame theory, which is a relatively new area of scholarly work." — CHOICE

• Acknowledgments1. IntroductionPart I: Coming of Age, Coming to Shame: The Parental and Cultural Transmission of Sexual, Racial, and Class Shame 2. The Humiliations of the Female Flesh in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women3. Family Violence, Incest, and White-Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina4. Racial Self-Loathing and the Color Complex in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun5. Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory6. Coming of Age in a Culture of Shame in Naomi Wolf’s PromiscuitiesPart II: Speaking a Kind of Body Language: Shamed Bodies and Spoiled Identities in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances 7. Feeling Fat, Fearing Fat in Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story8. The Culture of Appearances and the Socially Invisible and Unattractive Woman in Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil9. Gerontophobia and the Cultural Shaming of the Elderly Woman in May Sarton’s As We Are Now and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel10. Writing the Disfi gured and Disabled Body-Self in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext, Carnal Acts, and Waist-High in the World11. In ConclusionNotesWorks CitedIndex