Lacan and Romanticism

Draws from the work of Jacques Lacan to provide innovative readings of Romantic literature in the long nineteenth century. Lacan and Romanticism uses the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to deliver progressive readings of Romanticism by examining canonical Romantic authors such as William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Jane Austen, as well as lesser-known writers such as the graveyard poets and Sarah Scott. The contributors develop innovative approaches to Lacanian literary studies, focusing on neglected or emergent areas of Lacan’s thought and approaching Lacan’s best-known work in unexpected ways. The essay topics include the visible and seeable, war, the death drive, nonhuman sexualities, sublimation, loss and mourning, utopia, capitalism, fantasy, and topology, and they range from the mid-eighteenth through the early decades of the nineteenth centuries. The book reveals new ways of thinking about art and literature with psychoanalytic theory and suggests how theoretical approaches can contribute meaningfully to literary studies in general. Daniela Garofalo is Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of several books, including Manly Leaders in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, also published by SUNY Press, and Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism. David Sigler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary and is the author of Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753–1835.