Psychological Approaches to Literature
Psychoanalysis
Assesses the contributions of six major psychoanalytic thinkers in the light of current academic and clinical trends in psychoanalysis.
Fracture Feminism
Shows how feminist writing in British Romanticism developed alternatives to linear time.
The Other Rāma
A systematic analysis of the myth cycle of Paraśurāma (“Rāma with the Axe”), an avatára of Viṣṇu with a much darker reputation.
Coming Too Late
Rethinks the significance of the son’s relationship to his father for Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.
The Gardens of Desire
Offers a psychocritical reading of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past).
Embodied Shame
Examines how twentieth-century women writers depict female bodily shame and trauma.
Depression and Narrative
How the story of depression gets told in print, on screen, and online.
Risking Difference
Looks at the dynamics of identification, envy, and idealization in fictional narratives by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as in nonfictional accounts of cross-race relations by white feminists and feminists of color.
Post-Jungian Criticism
Rereads Jung in light of contemporary theoretical concerns, and offers a variety of examples of post-Jungian literary and cultural criticism.
Rereading George Eliot
A noted Eliot scholar explores how we become different interpreters of literature as we undergo psychological change.
Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis
Shows how literature can aid psychoanalysts in the understanding of psychological conflicts.
Literary Trauma
Examines representations of political, psychological, and sexual violence in seven novels by American women.
Gestural Politics
Explores James Joyce's use of parody and humor in his representation of women, gays, and Irish nationalism, and discusses how his complex attitude toward parody and stereotyping is related to his aesthetic vision.
Once Below a Time
Offers a psychoanalytically enhanced theory of poetics through close readings of Dylan Thomas and Julia Kristeva.
Psychoanalyses / Feminisms
Probes the complementary yet contested relations between psychoanalysis and feminism, emphasizing the plural nature of each.
The Wounded Body
Explores the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison, examining how it functions archetypally as both a cultural metaphor and a poetic image.
Hemingway's Fetishism
Demonstrates in painstaking detail and with reference to stunning new archival evidence how fetishism was crucial to the construction and negotiation of identity and gender in Hemingway's life and fiction.
Shelley's Mirrors of Love
Examines the myths and realities of narcissism in the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and explores how Shelley combated what he called “the principle of Self” by embracing the ideals of Christlike self-sacrifice and sisterly love.
Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye
Offers a complex analysis of the psychodynamic role of shame in Melville's work, with detailed readings of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and "Billy Budd. "
Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis
This book presents a reading of the Nietzschean thought of the eternal return of all things and relates it to Freud's psychoanalysis of the repetition compulsion. Nietzsche's eternal return and Freud's ...
Virginia Woolf and the Lust of Creation
"Every secret of a writer's soul, experience of his life, and quality of his mind is written large in his work. " -- Virginia Woolf
Panken enables us to read this secret language without doing violence ...