The Unconscious in Literature: The Oedipus Complex, the Death Drive, and the Unsymbolic Void

This book aims to investigate the unconscious in literature using Freudian and Lacanian psychology to analyse the unconscious in a range of literary works. The works of Thomas Hardy, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch are discussed in the first chapter through eight. Based on the argument in these chapters, this volume considers the environmental problem by examining the unconscious in the literary texts, including poetry, in the light of philosophers and critics on ecology. There is a focus on the Oedipus complex, the death drive, and the unsymbolic void, as they have much relevance to each other in the unconscious as to one’s relationship with others, primarily with the mother, and underlie the plots and leitmotifs of the literary texts discussed. The author carefully examines the complicated relationship between the infringement of the pleasure principle, and the unsymbolic void, and how they are depicted as various phases of nature. Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Notes 1 The Psychological Significance of the Double Ending in The Well-Beloved 1 2 3 4 Notes 2 The Internal Forces of the Plot in A Pair of Blue Eyes 1 2 3 4 Notes 3 The Symbolic Fixed and Dissolved in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1 2 3 4 Notes 4 A Reconsideration of the Dual Relationship and the Cosmic Perspective in Lord of the Flies 1 2 3 4 5 Notes 5 Nature and Human Beings in The Inheritors 1 2 3 4 Notes 6 The Black Hole and the Death Drive in Darkness Visible 1 2 3 4 Notes 7 The Unsymbolic Void Amidst the Light in ‘Miss Pulkinhorn’ 1 2 3 4 Notes 8 The Depiction of Nature and Its Originality in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction 1 2 3 4 5 Notes 9 The Unrepresentable Within Nature 1 2 3 4 Notes Conclusion Bibliography Index