A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture

A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture explores the history of psychoanalytic theory and its impact on contemporary literary and cultural criticism by tracing its movement across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. How and why does Freudian psychoanalysis speak to other cultures, histories, and materialities? This Companion contains original essays by leading scholars using a wide range of historical and cultural approaches to explore this and related questions. The essays discuss key concepts in psychoanalysis—such as the role of dreaming, psychosexuality, the unconscious, and the figure of the double—while also considering questions of gender, race, queer theory, time, and memory. They offer readings of various texts and cultural artifacts through the lens of different psychoanalytic theories against a wide range of historical  contexts. The coverage takes into account the increasingly international nature of psychoanalytic theory as well as its multi–disciplinary character, traversing the fields of literature, critical and cultural theory, feminist and gender studies, translation studies, and film.  Taken together, these essays provide a timely and pertinent assessment of current psychoanalytic methods that also sketch out future directions for theory and interpretation.

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She was previously Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests are in nineteenth–, twentieth–, and twenty–first century literature and culture, with particular focus on modernism, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury culture, life writing, literature and film, the history of psychoanalysis, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of several books, including The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) and the forthcoming books Dreams of Modernity: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Cinema (2014) and Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (2014). Ankhi Mukherjee is University Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. She was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English. Her research interests include nineteenth–, twentieth–, and twenty–first century British, Anglophone, and world literatures, with particular focus on critical and cultural theory, intellectual history, the novel, postcolonial studies, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2013) and Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007).