Written by a practising poet and novelist who has close experience of the subject matter and has published creative work in the areas being examined, Sexual Violence and Literary Art is a wide-ranging study, covering carefully selected works from Ovid through Shakespeare, to Pope, Richardson, Shelley, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov and beyond. It addresses the necessary complicity of any representation in what is represented, by examining ways in which canonical male writers have attempted to evoke and address representations of sexual violence in poetry, prose fiction, and poetic drama. Representation has to involve itself with what is represented, and, in this sense, it is not possible to address in literature sexual violence without taking on the complicity of the representation with what is represented. The chosen works of literary art are understood not only as locations in which the showing of pain and cruelty inflicted through sexually acts occurs, but also as occasions to activate means at these writings' disposal to work upon those representations of pain and cruelty towards possible readerly benefits. The book draws substantially upon recent criticism and theory written by philosophers, theorists, art historians, and literary critics including Martha Nussbaum, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Susan J. Brison, Mary D. Garrard, Griselda Pollock, Nancy J. Vickers, and Copp