Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and LiteratureValeria Finucci, Regina Schwartz Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the "external" social and economic spheres. Spurred by the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, Renaissance anxieties over changes in identity emerged in the period's unconscious--or, as Freud would have it, in its literature. Hence, much of Renaissance literature represents themes that have been prominent in the discourse of psychoanalysis: mistaken identity, incest, voyeurism, mourning, and the uncanny. The essays in this volume range from Spenser and Milton to Machiavelli and Ariosto, and focus on the fluidity of gender, the economics of sexual and sibling rivalry, the power of the visual, and the cultural echoes of the uncanny. The discussion of each topic highlights language as the medium of desire, transgression, or oppression. |
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... nature is animated by our loves and hates. Taken as a whole, then, these essays do not privilege any single psychoanalytic narrative; instead, they explore the dynamics between that psychoanalytic discourse known as “Renaissance ...
... nature tends toward perfection), raising the unwelcome possibility, for such a male-centered culture, that men could turn into women.12 Confusion about sexual difference contrasted with the generative “certainty,” which found its ...
... nature and his highly publicized claim to successfully fashion a self (as in Pico della Mirandola's “Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer”)?22 Here again some tantalizing questions come to the fore: Could the ...
... nature of dreams that need to be told and written down. The alliance of the literatures of the Renaissance and psychoanalysis deepens and assumes greater specificity over this mutual preoccupation with language. In a classic essay on ...
... Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Adriano Prosperi, ed., La corte e il cortegiano, vol. 2 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980); and Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman. 12. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex ...
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Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature Valeria Finucci,Regina Schwartz Limited preview - 1994 |
Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature Valeria Finucci,Regina M. Schwartz No preview available - 1994 |
Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature Valeria Finucci,Regina M. Schwartz No preview available - 1994 |