In this book, Perry Meisel argues that Freud's texts are properly literary, and casts Freud as both literary theoretician and practitioner. Here, after an introductory reception history of Freud as literature, Meisel provides a series of close readings of Freud's major texts that take literary representation as their central focus.
As for Freud's influence on others, it, too, is structured like a literary history, argues Meisel. He discusses Freud's influence on modernism, Strachey's Standard Edition (once again the subject of debate with the recent Penguin retranslations), and Freud's influence on Michel Foucault. Finally, we explore the relationship of Freud and literature. Does an understanding of how Freud himself writes and influences help us to read literature and interpret it anew?
Textual Note. Preface 1. A Reception History 2. 'Sensations' and 'Ideas' 3. Psychoanalysis and Aestheticism 4. A Supplement to the History of Modernism and Psychoanalysis 5. Strachey the Apostle 6. Freud and Foucault 7. Representation and Resistance in Mansfield, James, and Hardy 8. Biography and Literary History 9. The Ontology of the Pornographic Image 10. Freud, Bakhtin, Shakespeare Works Cited. Index
Biography
Perry Meisel is Professor of English at New York University. His many books include The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism After 1850, Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Mix Strachey, 1924-1925, and Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays.
"The Literary Freud is a compelling read from start to finish....Meisel has mad a significant contribution to dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature, a dialogue that promises to enliven texts on both sides of the disciplinary embrace."
-Gemma M. Ainslie, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 53, Release 6, Article 5
