Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis / Edition 2

by Elizabeth Abel

Overview

"A stunning, brilliant, absolutely compelling reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf's novels and essays. In addition to transforming our understanding of Woolf, this book radically expands our understanding of the historicity and contingent construction of psychoanalytic theory and our vision of the potential of psychoanalytic feminism."—Nancy J. Chodorow, University of California at Berkeley

"Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis brings Woolf's extraordinary craftsmanship back into view; the book combines powerful claims about sexual politics and intellectual history with the sort of meticulous, imaginative close reading that leaves us, simply, seeing much more in Woolf's words than we did before. It is the most exciting book on Woolf to come along in some time."—Lisa Ruddick, Modern Philology

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226000817
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/01/1993
Series:	Women in Culture and Society , #1
Edition description:	1
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Abel is the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis and Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow and the editor or coeditor of four collections, most recently, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Foreword
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. (En)gendering History
2. Between the Acts of Mrs. Dalloway
3. To the Lighthouse: James and Cam
4. Spatial Relations: Lily Briscoe's Painting
5. The Poetics of Hunger, the Politics of Desire: Woolf's Discursive Texts
6. The Lady Vanishes: Maternal Absence and Freudian Narratives in Between the Acts
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Abel (English, UC Berkeley) uncovers the parallels between Woolf's narratives and those produced concurrently by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein and defines Woolf's relation to the psychoanalytic culture that emerged in London in the 1920s. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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