A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture

This concise companion explores the history of psychoanalytic theory and its impact on contemporary literary criticism by tracing its movement across disciplinary and cultural boundaries.

• Contains original essays by leading scholars, using a wide range of cultural and historical approaches
• Discusses key concepts in psychoanalysis, such as the role of dreaming, psychosexuality, the unconscious, and the figure of the double, while considering questions of gender, race, asylum and international law, queer theory, time, and memory
• Spans the fields of psychoanalysis, literature, cultural theory, feminist and gender studies, translation studies, and film.
• Provides a timely and pertinent assessment of current psychoanalytic methods while also sketching out future directions for theory and interpretation

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She was previously Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests are in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century literature and culture, with particular focus on modernism, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury culture, life writing, literature and film, the history of psychoanalysis, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of several books, including The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) and the forthcoming books Dreams of Modernity: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Cinema (2014) and Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (2014).

Ankhi Mukherjee is University Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. She was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English. Her research interests include nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century British, Anglophone, and world literatures, with particular focus on critical and cultural theory, intellectual history, the novel, postcolonial studies, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2013) and Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007).