Desire Calls

Dangerous Desire is an important work that calls attention to how post-1960s literary representations of rape have shaped the ways in which both sexual and social freedoms are imagined in American culture. Exploring key post-sixties texts including Cleaver's Soul on Ice , Brownmiller's Against Our Will , French's The Women's Room, Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Walker's Meridian, and Dickey's Deliverance, Barnett finds that the widespread literary explorations of rape were almost always conjoined with one or more of the radical social movements of the sixties: civil rights, black nationalism, women's liberation and black feminism.