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Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.
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Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century. In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling: presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present day considers the relationship between allegory and symbolism analyses the use of allegory in modernist debate and deconstruction, looking at critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man provides a full glossary of technical terms and suggestions for further reading. Allegory offers an accessible, clear introduction to the history and use of this complex literary device. It is the ideal tool for all those seeking a greater understanding of texts that make use of allegory and of the significance of allegorical thinking to literature.
This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts. Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteent...
Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun's Fiction puts the short stories written by this outstanding Chinese writer between 1918 and 1926 into a broad context of Modernism. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881–1936) deals with the China moving beyond the 1911 Revolution. He asks about the possibilities of survival, and what that means, even considering the possibility that madness might be a strategy by which that is possible. Such an idea calls identity into question, and Lu Xun is read here as a writer for whom that is a wholly problematic concept. The book makes use of critical and cultural theory to consider these short stories in the context of not only Chinese fiction, but in terms of the art of the short story, and in relation to literary modernism. It attempts to put Lu Xun into as wide a perspective as possible for contemporary reading. To make his work widely accessible, he is treated here in English translation.
Wong Kar-wai's controversial film, Happy Together, was released in Hong Kong just before the handover of power in 1997. The film shows two Chinese gay men in Buenos Aires and reflects on Hong Kong's past and future by probing masculinity, aggression, identity, and homosexuality. It also gives a reading of Latin America, perhaps as an allegory of Hong Kong as another post-colonial society. Examining one single, memorable, and beautiful film, but placing it in the context of other films by Wong Kar-wai and other Hong Kong directors, this book illustrates the depth, as well as the spectacle and action, that characterizes Hong Kong cinema. Tambling investigates the possibility of seeing Happy To...
‘Among the numerous books on Dickens’s London, Going Astray is unique in combining detailed topography and biography with close textual analysis and theoretically informed critiques of most of the novelist’s major works. In Jeremy Tambling’s intriguing and illuminating synthesis, the London A-Z meets Nietzsche, Benjamin and Derrida.’ Rick Allen, author of The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700-1914 Dickens wrote so insistently about London – its streets, its people, its unknown areas – that certain parts of the city are forever haunted by him. Going Astray: Dickens and London looks at the novelist’s delight in losing the self in the labyrinthine...
This study looks at nineteenth - and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism as a crisis-state, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary high form of art altogether. Jeremy Tambling highlights the themes of the cultural crisis through a detailed discussion of some dozen operas and a general overview of the works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, and others, drawing on the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger, for an understanding of the ideological background. Reading fascism as a political, intellectual, and psychological phenomenon, the author draws on the works of Bataille, Theweleit, and Kristeva, for discussion of proto-fascist and fascist thought, and for its relation to gender-politics. Resisting the cliches about Wagner or Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich, Tambling takes the opera out the hermetically sealed-off state in which it is normally discussed, and presents it asboth complicit in, and in opposition to, the reactionary and regressive pressures that made up the `culture of fascism', and those that tried to make opera part of the `fascism of culture'.
It seems that the existence of poetry needs justifying, and so does paying attention to it. Why should we read it? 'Re-Verse' discusses poetry in both older and modern forms, wanting to show why it should interest us.
This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.