Title Novel relations: Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis / Alicia Mireles Christoff

Published Princeton ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, [2019]

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 271 pages) Contents Introduction -- Loneliness (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Winnicott, Bollas) -- Wishfulness (The Mill on the Floss, Bion, Phillips, Feminist and Queer of Color Critique) -- Restlessness (The Return of the Native, Balint, "Colonial Object Relations" -- Aliveness (Middlemarch, Joseph, Heimann, Ogden) Summary Novel Relations engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures-characters, narrators, authors, and other readers-shape and structure us too. For Christoff, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Christoff shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality-including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The first book to examine at length the connections between British psychoanalysis and Victorian fiction, Novel Relations describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-259) and index Notes In English Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed Subject English literature -- History and criticism -- 19th century Psychoanalysis and literature -- Great Britain 18.05 English literature. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. English literature Psychoanalysis and literature Englisch Psychoanalyse Rezeption Roman Literature. Great Britain Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 2023700471 ISBN 9780691194202 0691194203

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