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1. Introduction -- Part I: The Son Who Stutters -- 2. Stuttering Orators and Their Counterparts -- 3. Five Victorian Sons -- 4. Four Modern Sons -- Part II: The Son with Other Challenges -- 5. The Guilty Son -- 6. The Anorexic Son -- 7. 7. The Patricidal Son -- 8. Afterword. “Myron Tuman’s book is a beautifully written and powerfully argued analysis of what it means to stutter. From Demosthenes to Joe Biden, Tuman brings us closer to understanding this enigmatic condition as well as reminding those of us who stutter that we are part of a unique and talented community going back centuries. This is a well-researched and important addition to the small but growing canon of stutter lit.” —Jonty Claypole MBE, author of Words Fail Us “Myron Tuman’s The Stuttering Son is a pioneering work by a masterful writer and scholar in this under-examined field of literary studies. Among the book’s many strengths is its compelling weave of discourses between the psychoanalytic, literary, and personal. The case studies are compelling in their dramatic fusion of the biographic and the literary, enlivened by Tuman’s engaging, anecdotal, storytelling voice and enriched throughout by the lucid elegance of his prose. The Stuttering Son is not only a significant contribution and welcome addition to this area of literary studies, but to our understanding of the traumatic origins of the creative impulse—on which it sheds an inspired and instructive light.” —Stephen G. Brown, UNLV The Stuttering Son: A Literary Study of Boys and Their Fathers examines stuttering, a condition which overwhelmingly affects boys, in terms of the complex relationships a number of male authors have had with their fathers. Most of these writers, from Cotton Mather to John Updike, were themselves stutterers; for two others, Melville and Kafka, the focus shifts to how similar family tensions contributed to their interest in the related condition of anorexia. A final section looks at the patricidal impulse lurking behind much of this analysis, as evident in Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Nietzsche. By focusing on the issue of a boy’s emotional development, this book attempts to re-establish the value of a broadly psychological approach to understanding stuttering. Myron Tuman was a professor of English at universities in West Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana. His work on male writers and their mothers, The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) follows earlier studies of male writers and their sons, Melville’s Gay Father, and female writers and their fathers, Don Juan and His Daughter.
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