The Spectral Mother


Book Description

Sprengnether (English, U. of Minnesota) explores the strategies by which Freud avoided issues involving the mother, and undertakes a radical reinterpretation of the preoedipal mother from the perspective of feminist psychoanalytic theory. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




The Spectral Tarsier


Book Description

Part of the Primate Field Studies series. The Spectral Tarier shares the results of long-term field study by Sharon L. Gursky with a broad audience.




Monstrous Motherhood


Book Description

Spectral and monstrous mothers populate the cultural and literary landscape of the eighteenth century, overturning scholarly assumptions about this being an era of ideal motherhood. Although credited with the rise of domesticity, eighteenth-century British culture singularly lacked narratives of good mothers, ostensibly the most domestic of females. With startling frequency, the best mother was absent, disembodied, voiceless, or dead. British culture told tales almost exclusively of wicked, surrogate, or spectral mothers—revealing the defects of domestic ideology, the cultural fascination with standards and deviance, and the desire to police maternal behaviors. Monstrous Motherhood analyzes eighteenth-century motherhood in light of the inconsistencies among domestic ideology, narrative, and historical practice. If domesticity was so important, why is the good mother’s story absent or peripheral? What do the available maternal narratives suggest about domestic ideology and the expectations and enactment of motherhood? By focusing on literary and historical mothers in novels, plays, poems, diaries, conduct manuals, contemporary court cases, realist fiction, fairy tales, satire, and romance, Marilyn Francus reclaims silenced maternal voices and perspectives. She exposes the mechanisms of maternal marginalization and spectralization in eighteenth-century culture and revises the domesticity thesis. Monstrous Motherhood will compel scholars in eighteenth-century studies, women’s studies, family history, and cultural studies to reevaluate a foundational assumption that has driven much of the discourse in their fields.




The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination


Book Description

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.




The Spectral Book of Horror Stories


Book Description

19 BRAND NEW TALES TO CHILL YOUR BLOOD AND HAUNT YOUR DREAMS! The first in an annual anthology series, inspired by the Pan and Fontana books of yesteryear! "The figure crouched over his mother was... taking something from her, sliding some spidery thing that struggled and screamed soundlessly out of her side and into his leathery dark bag..." - THE NIGHT DOCTOR by Steve Rasnic Tem "I saw her skin turn black and erupt in blisters and pustules as in one last mute appeal she stretched her hand towards me over the flames..." - THE BOOK AND THE RING by Reggie Oliver "There wasn't much of a struggle even when Tomas lashed him, limb by limb, to the stakes, although he had plenty to say to Tomas's back as he walked away. It was when Tomas reappeared, leading the shaggy, horned thing from the barn, that Mr Sunshine really started to squeal..." - CURES FOR A SICKENED WORLD by Brian Hodge




Freud


Book Description

This book presents a radical look at the founder of psychoanalysis in his broader cultural context, addressing critical issues and challenging stereotypes.




King Hu's A Touch of Zen


Book Description

A Touch of Zen is one of the first Chinese-language films to gain recognition in an international film festival (the Grand Prix at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival), creating the generic mould for the "crossover" success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000. The film has achieved a cult status over the years but little has been written about it. This first book-length study of the classic martial arts film therefore redresses its critical neglect, and explores its multi-leveled dimensions and mysteries. One of the central features of the film is the enigmatic knight-lady (xia nü) whose quest for revenge leads her to cross paths with a poor scholar whose interest in military strategy seals their alliance. Teo discusses the psychological manifestations and implications of this relationship and concludes that the film's continuing relevance lies in its portrait of sexuality and the feminist desires of the heroine. Teo also analyzes the film's form as an action piece and the director's preoccupation with Zen as a creative inspiration and as a subject in its own right. As such, he argues that the film is a highly unconventional and idiosyncratic work which attempts to transcend its own genre and reach the heights of universal transcendence. Teo grounds his study in both Western and Chinese literary sources, providing a broad and comprehensive treatise based on the film's narrative concepts and symbols.




The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, 2 Volume Set


Book Description

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GOTHIC “Well written and interesting [it is] a testament to the breadth and depth of knowledge about its central subject among the more than 130 contributing writers, and also among the three editors, each of whom is a significant figure in the field of gothic studies … A reference work that’s firmly rooted in and actively devoted to expressing the current state of academic scholarship about its area.” New York Journal of Books “A substantial achievement.” Reference Reviews Comprehensive and wide-ranging, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic brings together over 200 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars writing on all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with challenging insights into the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture. The A-Z entries provide comprehensive coverage of relevant authors, national traditions, critical developments, and notable texts that continue to define, shape, and inform the genre. The volume’s approach is truly interdisciplinary, with essays by specialist international contributors whose expertise extends beyond Gothic literature to film, music, drama, art, and architecture. From Angels and American Gothic to Wilde and Witchcraft, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic is the definitive reference guide to all aspects of this strange and wondrous genre. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature is a comprehensive, scholarly, authoritative, and critical overview of literature and theory comprising individual titles covering key literary genres, periods, and sub-disciplines. Available both in print and online, this groundbreaking resource provides students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in literature and literary studies.




Theatre and the Macabre


Book Description

The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.




A Compulsion for Antiquity


Book Description

"If psychoanalysis is the return of repressed antiquity, distorted to be sure by modern desire, yet still bearing the telltale traces of the ancient archive, then would not our growing distance from the archive of antiquity also imply that we are in the process of losing our grip on psychoanalysis itself, as Freud conceived it?"--from Chapter 1As he developed his striking new science of the mind, Sigmund Freud had frequent recourse to ancient culture and the historical disciplines that draw on it. A Compulsion for Antiquity fully explores how Freud appropriated figures and themes from classical mythology and how the theory and practice of psychoanalysis paralleled contemporary developments in historiography, archaeology, philology, and the history of religions. Drawing extensively from Freud's private correspondence and other notes and documents, Richard H. Armstrong touches on Freud's indebtedness to Sophocles and the Oedipus complex, his interest in Moses and the Jewish religion, and his travels to Athens and Rome.Armstrong shows how Freud turned to the ancient world to deal with the challenges posed by his own scientific ambitions and how these lessons influenced the way he handled psychic "evidence" and formulated the universal application of what were initially isolated clinical truths. Freud's narrative reconstructions of the past also related to his sense of Jewishness, linking the historical trajectory of psychoanalysis with contemporary central European Jewish culture. Ranging across the breadth of Freud's work, A Compulsion for Antiquity offers fresh insights into the roots of psychoanalysis and fin de siècle European culture, and makes an important contribution to the burgeoning discipline of mnemohistory.