Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal, 2nd Edition

"In this new edition of her indispensable Psychoanalytic Criticism, Elizabeth Wright not only brings the story up to date by sketching the major developments of the last fifteen years but prepares psychoanalysis and its readers for the centenary of the movement in the year 2000. Wright asks all the key questions about psychoanalysis as an instrument of cultural criticism, explores the whole range of schools and tendencies and is unfailingly alert and judicious in her own critical judgements. Her book helps us to grasp the essential paradox of psychoanalysis today: the more insistently it is exposed to attack, the more profound and provocative its central insights seem." Malcolm Bowie, All Souls College, University of Oxford

"Elizabeth Wright's Psychoanalytic Criticism is the only place I know where two vital discourses, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, can achieve more than a passing acquaintance with each other. Professor Wright's central concern, the problematic relation of art to psychoanalysis, shapes the confrontations she carefully stages between the various Freudian and post-Freudian theories and their literary-critical counterparts. The new chapters that include contemporary work by Zizek, feminists, and the new Lacanians maintain this book as crucially relevant." Juliet Flower MacCannell, The University of California

"Psychoanalytic Criticism provided a judicious and indispensable guide to this often bewildering and complex field of literary studies ... This second and updated edition, therefore, is to be welcomed. Wright has not just reissued the book but has used the opportunity to take stock of the field and reappraise the current state of play in psychoanalytic studies." Psychoanalytic Studies

'One cannot but admire its breadth and energy.' Psychoanalysis, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory