Incest, Incorporation, and King Lear in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres

Suggests that Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” is a faithful and a “profoundly subversive” revision of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Argues that the terms in which the novel have been most frequently praised, no less than the case made for banning it, raise important questions about the relationship between the novel’s secret and the source of Smiley’s Shakespearean “production.”