Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture

by Carla Mazzio (Editor), Douglas Trevor (Editor)

Overview

First published in 2000. Did people in early modern Europe have a concept of an inner self? Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural, and history scholars to answer this intriguing question. Through a synthesis of historicism and psychoanalytic criticism, the contributors explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union of history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as "fetishes and Renaissances," "the cartographic unconscious," and "the topographic imaginary," these essays move beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415920520
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/06/2000
Series:	CultureWork: A Book Series from the Center for Literacy and Cultural Studies at Harvard
Pages:	428
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carla Mazzio is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. She is the coeditor of The Body in Parts (Routledge, 1997) and Social Control and the Arts (1991). Douglas Trevor is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa.

Table of Contents

I Dreams of History An Introduction FIELDING QUESTIONS 2 Fetishisms and Renaissances 3 Dreams of Field Early Modern (Dis)Positions 4 Toward a Topographic Imaginary Early Modern Paris 5 "To Please the Wiser Sort" Violence and Philosophy in Hamlet 6 Abel Drugger's Sign and the Fetishes of no Material Culture GRAPHIC IMAGINATIONS 7 Erotic Islands Contours of Villon's Printed Testament (1489), 8 The Interpretation of Dreams, circa 1610, 9 The Melancholy of Print Love's Labour's Lost 10 George Herbert and the Scene of Writing DEPTH PERCEPTIONS 11 The Anus in Coriolanus 12 Breaking the Mirror Stage 13 The Inside Story 14 Sorcery and Subjectivity in Early Modern Discourses of Witchcraft LEGACIES, 15 Weeping for Hecuba 16 Second-Best Bed

Editorial Reviews

This work contains 16 academic essays by as many authors, including Mazzio (English, Univ. of Michigan), Trevor (teaching fellow, English, Harvard), and Marjorie Garber, who edits the "Culture Work" series, of which this is the sixth book. Most of the authors are from English departments and write heady stuff, in this case contrasting and melding epistemologies of Marx and Freud to delve into 15th- and 16th-century individuality (subjectivity). Those familiar with Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Joan Copjec, who are often referred to, will be comfortable with the language and some of the arguments. However, only general readers with backgrounds in the chapter topics (e.g., Shakespeare, Villon) or those who enjoy brilliant speculation on rarefied ideas will be rewarded. "The Inside Story" by David Hillman (the only psychologist here) concerns the boundaries of inner and outer, the spatial metaphor as found in Hamlet. This is material for historians in general and of culture and medicine in particular, as well as psychoanalytically sophisticated literary critics.--E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

"Heady stuff... This is material for historians in general and of culture and medicine in particular, as well as psychoanalytically sophisticated literary critics." — Library Journal

From the Publisher