Lacan and Fantasy Literature: Portents of Modernity in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies)

A Lacanian reading of fantasy fiction 1887-1914 showing the return of atavistic horrors in the wake of the dissolution of traditional authorities. The book shows the critical power of fantasy read in conjunction with psychoanalysis in exploring profound socio-political questions.Eschewing the all-pervading contextual approach to literary criticism, this book takes a Lacanian view of several popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, revealing the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern democratic urban society in place of the traditional agrarian one. Moreover, counter-intuitively it turns out that fantasy literature is analogous to modern Galilean science in its manipulation of the symbolic thereby changing our conception of reality. It is imaginary devices such as vampires and ape-men, which in conjunction with Lacanian theory say something additional of the truth about – primarily sexual – aspects of human subjectivity and culture, repressed by the contemporary hegemonic discourses. Lacan and Fantasy Literature: Portents of Modernity in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Introduction 1 The Modernization of Britain 1870–1914 2 Lacan and the Question of Evidence 3 Lacan’s Reconsideration of Totem and Taboo 1 Totem and Taboo and Oedipus Rex 2 The Name-of-the-Father 3 The Thing (Das Ding) and Object a 4 Anxiety and Object a 5 Père ou Pire: Father or Worse 4 Science and the Thing: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World 1 The Doubling of the Primal Father 2 The Abdication of the Father 3 The Father-Out-Law 4 The Return of the Courtly Love Tradition 5 Courtly Love as Art and the (Scientific) Need to See for Oneself 6 The ‘Larger than Life’ Scientist 7 Lacan and Sublimation 8 Science and Civilization 9 The Ending of the Novel: The Use of Beauty 5 The Missing Name-of-the-Father: She 1 She and Totem and Taboo 2 The Fantasy Space 3 The Asexual Primal Father 4 A Land Where the Names of Fathers are Missing 5 The Absence of the (Normal) Sexual Relationship 6 The Father’s Bequest to His Son 7 Myth, Fantasy and Realism 6 The Recuperation of the Thing: ‘The Horror of the Heights’ 1 The Symbolic, the Real and the Thing 2 The Danger of the Thing 3 The Social versus a Deadly Solipsistic Enjoyment 4 The Primal Father Who Enjoys 5 The Return to the Greek Myths 7 The Name-of-Science: The Invisible Man 1 The Invisible Man as Primal Father 2 Invisibility and the Anonymity of the City 3 Beyond the Law 4 The Impossibility of a ‘Special, Solitary Enjoyment’ 5 The Cancellation of the Name-of-the-Father 6 The Impossible Existence 7 ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King’ 8 The Re-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father: Dracula 1 Lacanian Readings of Dracula 2 Dracula as Totem and Taboo 3 The Fantasy Area: Transylvania and the Loss of the Symbolic 4 Dracula’s Castle and Freud’s Reception Hall 5 In the Castle: Dracula as Jonathan Harker’s Double 6 Van Helsing and the Return of the Master Conclusion Bibliography Index Departing from the dominant contextual approach to literary criticism, the book takes a Lacanian view of several popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century, including Bram Stoker?s 'Dracula'. This paradigm reveals the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern urban democratic society in place of a traditional agrarian one. It is in the wake of the demise of traditional authority; father, aristocracy and church that such atavistic horrors as vampires emerge. Sharoni demonstrates how these texts bring to light the crucial function of apparently obsolete symbolic frameworks in human culture