Taking Sigmund Freud's theories as a point of departure, Jean-Michel Rabaté's book explores the intriguing ties between psychoanalysis and literature.

Combining literature and psychoanalysis, this collection foregrounds the work of literary creators as foundational to psychoanalysis.

This collection of specially commissioned essays by academics and practising psychoanalysts, first published in 2003, explores key dimensions of Jacques Lacan's life and works. Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at the time when it underwent a certain intellectual decline. Advocating a 'return to Freud', by which he meant a close reading in the original of Freud's works, he stressed the idea that the unconscious functions 'like a language'. All essays in this Companion focus on key terms in Lacan's often difficult and idiosyncratic developments of psychoanalysis. This volume will bring fresh, accessible perspectives to the work of this formidable and influential thinker. These essays, supported by a useful chronology and guide to further reading will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

This Introduction provides an original, synthetic overview of the relations between literature and philosophy from ancient times to the present. The book covers a wide range of genres, historical periods, and topics, making it a valuable introduction and guide for students, teachers, and researchers in literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy.

Fantasy is a creation of the Enlightenment, and the recognition that excitement and wonder can be found in imagining impossible things. From the ghost stories of the Gothic to the zombies and vampires of twenty-first-century popular literature, from Mrs Radcliffe to Ms Rowling, the fantastic has been popular with readers. Since Tolkien and his many imitators, however, it has become a major publishing phenomenon. In this volume, critics and authors of fantasy look at its history since the Enlightenment, introduce readers to some of the different codes for the reading and understanding of fantasy, and examine some of the many varieties and subgenres of fantasy; from magical realism at the more literary end of the genre, to paranormal romance at the more popular end. The book is edited by the same pair who produced The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (winner of a Hugo Award in 2005).

This volume covers all the central topics of Freud's work, from sexuality to neurosis to morality, art, and culture.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis explains the link between literature and psychoanalysis for students, critics and teachers. It offers a twenty-first century resource for defining and analyzing the psychoanalytic dimensions of human creativity in contemporary society. Essays provide critical perspectives on selected canonical authors, such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin It also offers analysis of contemporary literature of social, sexual and political turmoil, as well as newer forms such as film, graphic narrative, and autofiction. Divided into five sections, each offering the reader different subject areas to explore, this volume shows how psychoanalytic approaches to literature can provide valuable methods of interpretation. It will be a key resource for students, teachers and researchers in the field of literature and psychoanalysis as well as literary theory.