Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem of how to write ‘life itself.’ Ghost stories are split between an ironic, often parodic reference to Gothic style and an evocation of ‘life itself,’ an implicit repudiation of all literary style. Reading the ghost story as both a guest and a host story, this book traces the ghost as a disruptive figure in the ‘hospitable’ space of narrative from Maturin, Poe and Dickens to the fin de siècle, and then on into the twentieth century.

Literature & Fiction

Thurston, Luke

British & Irish

Routledge

Psychoanalytic readings of Joyce abound, despite Joyce's deliberate attempts to resist them. Luke Thurston argues that this very antagonism determines how psychoanalytic thinking can influence Joycean criticism and literary theory. Thus, Jacques Lacan attempts to understand how Joyce's writing presents an unreadable signature that defies translation into discourse. Thurston imaginatively develops Lacan's work to illuminate Joyce's position in a literary hierarchy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde.

James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis

Cambridge University Press

What is at stake in Freud's enduring preoccupation with a process supposedly diverting sexuality into cultural activity? In this study, a leading scholar of psychoanalysis and literature re-opens the old question of sublimation in a critical reading that explores one of the last remaining puzzles of Freudian thought. Using the rigorous framework provided by Jean Laplanche, Luke Thurston resituates sublimation as an unfinished Freudian concept bound up with a much wider history of philosophical and literary reflection. Exploring the misunderstanding and reinvention of sublimation both in accounts of cultural history and in Lacan's celebrated reading of Antigone, Thurston challenges some of the prevalent assumptions still seen in contemporary "theory." Thurston links his critical investigation of psychoanalysis to modernist literature, discovering both parallels and alternatives to Freud's idea of sublimation in little-known works by May Sinclair and David Jones. The study concludes by arguing that these modernist artists, both of whom were significantly affected by trauma during the First World War, produced work radically at odds with the established canons of representation, and that this "anti-hermeneutic" art can be linked to a "Copernican" sublimation, a process not controlled by the ego but vitalizing it and decentring its habitual structure.

Understanding Sublimation in Freudian Theory and Modernist Writing (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

History & Criticism

This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem of how to write ‘life itself.’ Ghost stories are split between an ironic, often parodic reference to Gothic style and an evocation of ‘life itself,’ an implicit repudiation of all literary style. Reading the ghost story as both a guest and a host story, this book traces the ghost as a disruptive figure in the ‘hospitable’ space of narrative from Maturin, Poe and Dickens to the fin de siècle, and then on into the twentieth century.

The essays collected in Re-inventing the Symptom explore the final period of Jacques Lacan's teaching, focusing on his 1975-76 seminar Le sinthome. This book sheds light on the central questions of this last "phase" of Lacanian theory and unravels the principal enigmas of the seminars. The work as a whole breaks through previous obstacles to the act of reading Lacon's last work, among them the notorious restrictions placed upon the publication and translation of Lacan's teachings. The contributors examine Lacan's late work from a variety of perspectives. They consider his theories on Boromean knot topology and rethink readings of his views on sexual difference, his encounter with Joyce, and even his consideration that his work was not theory at all, but rather a kind of writing. These lucid essays offer a dazzling reading of works previously considered elusive. Students and practitioners of psychoanalysis alike will benefit from this revolutionary collection. The contributors mark the territory for a more widespread deployment of Lacanian theory in our cultural landscape, from modernism to deconstruction and feminism. At last, those who seek to approach Lacanian thought and apply its relevance to their own fields have a radical new tool made readily available to them.

Reinventing the Symptom (Contemporary Theory)

Essays & Correspondence

Other Press

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Books by Thurston, Luke

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thurston, Luke. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis

James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis

Understanding Sublimation in Freudian Theory and Modernist Writing (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

Reinventing the Symptom (Contemporary Theory)