A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (Concise Companions to Literature and Culture)

"This stimulating and wide-ranging collection resituates psychoanalysis firmly in the contemporary world. A series of brilliantly conceived and complementary chapters―-on adolescence and asylum, Freud’s magic carpet and medieval dreams, primetime TV and the psychoanalytic animal, translation and teaching (to name only a few)―-builds a powerful case for the continuing purchase of psychoanalytic thought on literary and cultural studies today."
―Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge

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.