Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud - Softcover

Edmundson, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226184617 ISBN 13: 9780226184616

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

When most critics were using Freudian theories to study literature, Mark Edmundson read Freud’s writings as literature alongside the works of poets grappling with the heady issues of desire, narcissism, and grief. Towards Reading Freud weighs the psychoanalyst’s therapeutic directives against his more visionary impulses in a magisterial comparative study of such writers as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Keats. Cross-fertilizing psychological doctrine with the literary canon, this richly informed volume forges a new understanding of Freud’s writings on the self.

“Marvelous. . . . Edmundson’s book offers an extraordinary challenge both to practicing analysts and to a scholarly community which all too uncomplainingly inhabits and reinforces the Freudian paradigm of interpretation. Edmundson reinvents an adventurous and dissident Freud as an antidote to . . . weary psychoanalytic commonplaces.”—Malcolm Bowie, Raritan

“This book takes a distinguished place in the ongoing effort to recontextualize Freud by stressing the literary, rather than the scientific roots and character of his theory.”—Virginia Quarterly Review

About this title

About the Author

Mark Edmundson is the Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor of Romantic Poetry and Literary Theory at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books, including The Death of Freud and Why Read?

From the Back Cover

In this book Edmundson reverses the usual practice of using Freud to analyze literary texts. Instead, he reads Freud by analogy with major imaginative writers for whom the figuring and refiguring of the self is a central activity. His readings expose a dialect between the therapeutic Freud and Freud the sublime author and challenge the normative role of psychoanalysis both in society and in literary criticism.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226184617
• ISBN 13: 9780226184616
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184