Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject

by Linda Ruth Williams

Tracing the history of psychoanalysis' love affair with literature, and literary critical encounters with psychoanalysis, this book shows, with examples from literature and film, the shifts and changes in psychoanalytic thought on culture and aesthetics. It presents readings of specific texts in tandem with accounts of the development of Freudian psychoanalysis, Kleinian and Lacanian analysis, the work of Winnicot, Laplanche and more recent post-structuralist psychoanalytic readers. The texts chosen for attention include Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cousin Phillis", D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers", Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letters", Angela Carter's "Nights at the Circus", Margaret Oliphant's "Autobiography", Freud's "Wolf Man" case, Daphne du Maurier's short story "Don't Look Now" (and Nicholas Roeg's film adaptation of it), poems by Christina Rossetti, Sheridan le Fanu's "Carmilla", and - as an example of a text apparently resistant to analysis - Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure".

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 17, 1995