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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 40
... theory. Changing demographics are no small factor in imagining a Renaissance psychology: husbands were typically twice the age of their wives; fathers in early modern Italy were the age of men who were grandfathers in nineteenth-century ...
... theory of humors looked at character according to the dominance of four bodily fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm; the preponderance of one had social as well as physical and psychological implications. Melancholic women ...
... theories of sexual homology in which males and females have identical sexual organs that protrude or remain inside according to a caloric economy. That belief left the frightening specter of a person's sex changing with changes in ...
... theory differed markedly from our own: before Kepler, light was not central to the process; rather, objects were visible by their own agency. Visual power lay not in the eye of the observer, but in the object seen, for it generated ...
... Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Linda Gregorson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge ...
Other editions - View all
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 |