A psychoanalytic history of the novel from nineteenth-century realism to Woolf and Joyce.
Lacanian theory has long been accused of being ahistorical. In The Subject of Modernism, Tony E. Jackson combines a uniquely graspable explanation of the Lacanian theory of the self with a series of detailed psychoanalytic interpretations of actual texts to offer a new kind of literary history.
Jackson shows that the basic plot-structure of realistic novels reveals an unconscious desire to preserve a certain kind of historically institutionalized self, but that the desire of realism to write the most real representation of reality steadily makes the self-preservation more difficult to sustain. Jackson charts the resistances to and misrecog-nitions of this discovery as they are revealed in the changes of narrative form from Eliot's Daniel Deronda, through Conrad's Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. He ends with an appended consideration of the "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa" chapters from Joyces's Ulysses.
Jackson reads the emergence of modernism as a kind of generic self-analysis of realism, analogous to the self-analysis performed by Freud: when realism discovers the significance of its own desire to write the most real representation of reality, it has, in that moment, become modernism.
The Subject of Modernism will appeal not only to readers of Victorian and modernist fiction, but to those interested in the history of the novel and in literary history in general. Anyone interested in the history of aesthetics will find here new ways to examine particular art forms.
Tony E. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English, Idaho State University.
Return to New Books subject areas
6 x 9, ca 224 pagesISBN 0-472-10552-3
cloth 39.50E (tentative)
December
Of related interest
Dead Fathers
The Logic of Transference in Modern Narrative
Nina Schwartz
6 x 9, ca 208 pages, 1994ISBN 0-472-10523-X
cloth 34.50E (tentative)