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George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.
George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.
One of literature's greatest gifts is its portrayal of realistically drawn characters--human beings in whom we can recognize motivations and emotions. In Imagined Human Beings, Bernard J. Paris explores the inner conflicts of some of literature's most famous characters, using Karen Horney's psychoanalytic theories to understand the behavior of these characters as we would the behavior of real people. When realistically drawn characters are understood in psychological terms, they tend to escape their roles in the plot and thus subvert the view of them advanced by the author. A Horneyan approach both alerts us to conflicts between plot and characterization, rhetoric and mimesis, and helps us understand the forces in the author's personalty that generate them. The Horneyan model can make sense of thematic inconsistencies by seeing them as the product of the author's inner divisions. Paris uses this approach to explore a wide range of texts, including Antigone, "The Clerk's Tale," The Merchant of Venice, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Awakening, and The End of the Road.
The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is an experiment in post-Jungian literary criticism and methodology. Its primary aim is to challenge current views about the correlation between narrative structure, gender, and the governing psychological dilemma in four nineteenth-century British novels. The overarching argument is that the opening situation in a novel represents an implicit challenge facing not the obvious hero/heroine but the individual that Terence Dawson defines as the "effective protagonist." To illustrate his claim, Dawson pairs two sets of novels with unexpectedly comparable dilemmas: Ivanhoe with The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights with Silas Marner. In all four novels, the effective protagonist is an apparently minor figure whose crucial function in the ordering of the events has been overlooked. Rereading these well-known texts in relation to hitherto neglected characters uncovers startling new issues at their heart and demonstrates innovative ways of exploring both narrative and literary tradition.
"A compelling, massively researched psychoanalytic study of the inability to mourn in Melville, Twain and Hemingway, and its roots in maternal loss".--Ann Douglas, author of TERRIBLE HONESTY: MONGREL MANHATTAN IN THE 1920S. "This insightful text is recommended for all students of American culture and literature".--CHOICE.
What makes one reader look for issues of social conformity in Kafka's Metamorphosis while another concentrates on the relationship between Gregor Samsa and his father? Self-Analysis in Literary Study investigates how the psychoanalytic self-analysis enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of literature as well as themselves. In the past scholars have largely ignored self-analysis as an aid to approaching literature. The contributors in Self-Analysis in Literary Study boldly explore how the psyche affects intellectual intellectual discovery in the realm of applied psychoanalysis. Jeffrey Berman confronts a close friend's suicide through Camus and his student's diaries, kept for an Engl...
In Untamed and Unabashed, Regina Barreca, noted authority on women and humor, examines the use of humor in the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon. She analyzes the ways that each writer uses comedic devices, especially those involving language itself, and discusses the gendered basis of their humor, providing a provocative feminist perspective on gender and comedy. Each of the essays argues that conservative critics have misread and misunderstood the importance of humor in the works of these women authors, and that women's humor serves to explode conventions oppressive to women and to offer women readers a critique of, and an a...
A cultural history of the honeymoon in Victorian culture, private accounts, and fiction.
Response to Death presents a literary historical perspective on mourning, tracing examples of mourning in literary works from the medieval world to the present day. Contributors offer a chronological examination of the concept of the work of mourning in specific literary and historical contexts, beginning with an exploration of the medieval York Cycle of plays and sixteenth-century French women's lyric, and continuing through the Renaissance with considerations of Shakespeare, the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth century.