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Insane Passions
In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as “the Papin affair,” the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan’s effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and H.D.’s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films—including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the “psychotic lesbian” repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.
King Lear
Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identit...
The Subversive Harry Potter
The seven books in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series bring together a variety of aspects of young adult fiction and portray youthful rebellion as well as cultural containment and an adolescent's negotiations through these conflicting forces. This detailed study of Harry Potter explores the limits of the formulaic structure of adolescent fantasy fiction and also examines the impulse of exploration, subversion, and resistance contained within the formula. Within both subversion and containment in the narrative, young adult fantasy becomes an embodiment of the experience of adolescence--its angst, rebellion and also its journey of personal maturation.
Reading for the Truth
Through detailed discussion of central works in Norwegian fiction, Reading for the Truth illustrates and substantiates some important points in the theory of literary interpretation. Inspired by Donald Davidson's epistemological concept of triangulation, the author argues that intersubjective literary interpretation is an attractive alternative to critical practices that focus either on authorial intention or on the ability of readers to impute to a text whatever meaning they like. For when the meaning of a text is arrived at intersubjectively by two or more readers it is much more likely to be an instance of critical truth than when its meaning is assigned by an single reader or critic. The book discusses such canonical works as Arne Garborg, Peace (1892), Knut Hamsun, Pan (1894), and Ole E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth (1924), as well as short stories by Maurits Hansen, Alexander L. Kielland, and Terje Stigen. Focusing on the role of rhetoric and irony in these texts, Sjavik shows how an intersubjective approach is advantageous, if not indeed necessary, in any serious attempt to establish their meaning."
Persons and their Minds
Today’s approaches to the study of the human mind are divided into seemingly opposed camps. On one side we find the neurosciences, with their more or less reductionist research programs, and on the other side we find the cultural and discursive approaches, with their frequent neglect of the material sides of human life. Persons and their Minds seeks to develop an integrative theory of the mind with room for both brain and culture. Brinkmann’s remarkable and thought-provoking work is one of the first books to integrate brain research with phenomenology, social practice studies and actor-network theory, all of which are held together by the concept of the person. Brinkmann’s new and info...
From Alice to Harry Potter
'The longer I live, the more I am convinced of the importance of children's books.' When Robert Bloomfield wrote this in 1817 he could have had no idea of the range of children's books to come, nor of how in England fantasy would be their outstanding form. In this survey of 400 English children's fantasies from 1850 to 2000, taking in authors from the well-known Charles Kingsley, C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling to the less-known Annie Keary, Edith Elias and Pete Johnson, Colin Manlove shows just how good their books often are as literature. He combines new interpretations of individual works with explanations of how and why their character changes over time, reflecting their different cultural settings. This book is intended both as a critical companion for children's literature courses, and as a stimulus for the general reader and students at all levels.
A New Modern Philosophy
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are arguably the most important period in philosophy’s history, given that they set a new and broad foundation for subsequent philosophical thought. Over the last decade, however, discontent among instructors has grown with coursebooks’ unwavering focus on the era’s seven most well-known philosophers—all of them white and male—and on their exclusively metaphysical and epistemological concerns. While few dispute the centrality of these figures and the questions they raised, the modern era also included essential contributions from women—like Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Émilie Du Châtelet—as well as...
Cosmetic, Aesthetic, Prophetic: Beyond the Boundaries of Beauty
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. The ever-elusive field of Beauty Studies is one that often underappreciated, yet it is a key concept across all spheres of knowledge, transcending traditional and innovative epistemologies, and providing provocative insights into fundamental aspects of human existence. Here, researchers from around the globe contribute rich and diverse ideas and perspectives from a multitude of disciplines to highlight, explore, and re-evaluate the significance and infinite implications of this pervading topic, within history, science, society, culture, new media, mathematics, art, and literature.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
This is a revised and updated edition of a 1990 study of Harriet Beecher Stowe's epic antislavery novel, in which the author focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe's epic antislavery novel, in which the author focuses on the political, philosophical, and religious ideas in Stowe's work, finding its reflections on the problem of evil still timely in the twenty-first century. The book provides a useful overview of the novel's critical reception from early African-American reactions to the recent "canon wars."
The Hobbit Party
Anyone who has read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can gather that their author hated tyranny, but few know that the novelist who once described himself as a hobbit “in all but size” was—even by hobbit standards—a zealous proponent of economic freedom and small government. There is a growing concern among many that the West is sliding into political, economic, and moral bankruptcy. In his beloved novels of Middle-Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien has drawn us a map to freedom. Scholar Joseph Pearce, who himself has written articles and chapters on the political significance of Tolkien’s work, testified in his book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, “If much has been written on the re...
