The book argues that in the encounter between desire and ideology we find American literature to be a narrative of a decentered ego in the context of a culture that subverts structure and stability in order to promote change and renewal. Consensus and dissensus commingle in a process of disintegration and reconstruction. The book applies modern theories of literature and psychoanalysis to a broad range of American literary works and extends to the unconscious recent theoretical discussions of the relationship between literature and ideology. The book attempts a reconstruction, not only of American literature and culture, but of Freud as well.

Product Description: Admirers of the work of Sylvia Plath will welcome this new paperback edition of a study, first published by The Athlone Press in 1976, which provides coherent and persuasive readings of her poetry. Drawing upon the traditional skills of the literary critic, David Holbrook also deploys the illumination of both psychoanalysis and phenomenology in a pioneering work of literary, individual and cultural interpretation...read more

The book argues that in the encounter between desire and ideology we find American literature to be a narrative of a decentered ego in the context of a culture that subverts structure and stability in order to promote change and renewal. Consensus and dissensus commingle in a process of disintegration and reconstruction. The book applies modern theories of literature and psychoanalysis to a broad range of American literary works and extends to the unconscious recent theoretical discussions of the relationship between literature and ideology. The book attempts a reconstruction, not only of American literature and culture, but of Freud as well.

Product Description: "Foreign Bodies" investigates the relation between the notion of trauma and possible forms of representation within the necessary constraints that traumatic experience itself imposes. While many influential trauma theorists have focused on the notion of textual "voice" in their search for appropriate, effective, and adequate representational modes, the book argues that the act of narrating trauma cannot exclude corporeality as one of the central figures of this telling...read more

In this book Mark Edmundson reverses the usual practice of using Freud to analyze literary texts. Instead, he reads Freud by analogy with major imaginative writers for whom the figuring and refiguring of the self is a central activity. His readings expose a dialectic between the therapeutic Freud and Freud the sublime author and challenge the normative role of psychoanalysis both in society and in literary criticism. Edmundson begins by comparing the Oedipal passage in The Interpretation of Dreams with works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. He reads Freud's "On Narcissism" through the lens of Eve's Narcissus scene in Paradise Lost; considers the papers on therapeutic technique against Wordsworth's Prelude and major lyrics; and places the ethos of "Mourning and Melancholia" in contrast to the American "refusal to mourn" that informs Emerson's essays. The readings show that even as Freud is representing general human limits, he is frequently reinventing himself symbolically in ways that defy his own normative standards. Edmundson asks, then, whether Freud's self-creating drive, or that exemplified by any of the "literary" authors in the study, can serve as an example of useful resistance against the tendencies that normative psychoanalysis reinforces within society.

Product Description: First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: In American literature, a traumatic scene of racial and sexual awakening - frequently involving photographs, mirrors, or acts of witnessing - often precipitates a character's "discovery" of racial identity. Similarly, in the annals of psychoanalysis, notions of self and sexual identity often arise from visual trauma such as the mirror stage and primal scene...read more

Product Description: This book explores women's desire for women as it is located in examples of twentieth-century British and American women's writing, including fiction, memoir, and poetry by such writers as Virginia Woolf, Vivian Gornick, Dorothy Allison, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marilyn Hacker, and Audre Lorde...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Writing Prejudices addresses critical attempts to undermine prejudice through education in general, and literary studies in particular. Robert Samuels argues that these attempts often fail because they do not take into account the different forms of prejudice, the role played by homophobia in racism and sexism, the structure of what Lacan calls symbolic castration, and the unconscious foundations of cultural formations. Addressing these deficiencies, Samuels uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the manifestations of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia in the works of Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Toni Morrison, showing how these distinct modes of oppression feed off of each other and the diverse ways that cultural critics can work to undermine them. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book examines portrayals of political and psychological trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in the work of seven American women writers. Concentrating on novels by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, Gayl Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood, Horvitz investigates whether memories of violent and oppressive trauma can be preserved, even transformed into art, without reproducing that violence...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Doreen Fowler's Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed is only the second book-length pychoanalytic interpretation of Faulkner's oeuvre and the first to be predicated on Lacanian theory as modified by Kristeva and Chodorow. Fowler exposes psychic conflicts that drive Faulkner's fiction and posits from them an underlying tension between the desire for difference and wholeness, between the mother and the father, between the living body and death...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Quiet As It's Kept draws on and extends recent psychoanalytic and psychiatric work of shame and trauma theorists to offer an in-depth analysis of Toni Morrison's representation of painful and shameful race matters in her fiction. Providing a frank and sustained look at the troubling, if not distressing, aspects of Morrison's fiction that other critics have studiously avoided or minimized in their commentaries, this book challenges established views of Morrison, showing her to be an author who forces readers into uncomfortable confrontations with matters of race...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Book by Clasby, Nancy (view table of contents)

Product Description: Whether revered for his masculinity, condemned as an icon of machismo, or perceived as possessing complex androgynous characteristics, Ernest Hemingway is acknowledged to be one of the most important twentieth-century American novelists...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: In Hemingway s Fetishism, Carl Eby demonstrates in painstaking detail and with stunning new archival evidence how fetishism was crucial to the construction and negotiation of identity and gender in both Hemingway s life and his fiction...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Although psychoanalytic theory is one of the most important and influential tools in contemporary literary criticism, to date it has had very little impact on the study of African-American literature and culture. Now, Claudia Tate argues that psycholanalytic paradigms can produce rich readings of African-American desire, alienation, and subjectivity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study offers a complex analysis of the psychodynamic role of shame in Melville's work, with detailed readings of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and "Billy Budd." Its concrete application of the rich analytic framework supplied by work of such theorists as Heinz Kohut, Leon Wurmser, Silvan Tomkins, and Donald Nathanson implicitly challenges the contemporary reliance on an often abstract poststructuralist model of psychoanalysis...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Reveals the literary, spiritual, and psychological development of a poet who used writing to heal from the inner pain of his parents' deaths. Examines his life and works, and how his work reflected the psychic turmoil within himself and American society...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)