The author of The Debt to Pleasure digs into his family's extraordinary past in a memoir as enthralling as his finest fiction It was only when his mother died that John Lanchester realized how little he really knew about his parents. With the cache of letters and papers she left behind, he set out to reconstruct just who his parents had been. In doing so, he did much more than trace the remarkable story of a reluctant international banker, a secretive former nun, and the life they shared; he also gained extraordinary insight into his own nature and a deeper understanding of the universal push-pull of family love-and family loss. Part detective work, part evocation of character, this is, above all, compelling storytelling.

This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a daring, multidisciplinary investigation of the imaginative foundations of modern politics. Hunt uses the term `Family Romance', (coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and belonging to one of higher social standing), in a broader sense, to describe the images of the familial order that structured the collective political unconscious. In a wide-ranging account that uses novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that the politics of the French Revolution were experienced through the network of the family romance.

Édouard Manet's paintings have long been recognized for being visually compelling and uniquely recalcitrant. While critics have noted the presence of family members and intimates in paintings such as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Nancy Locke takes an unprecedented look at the significance of the artist's family relationships for his art. Locke argues that a kind of mythology of the family, or Freudian family romance, frequently structures Manet's compositional decisions and choice of models. By looking at the representation of the family as a volatile mechanism for the development of sexuality and of repression, conflict, and desire, Locke brings powerful new interpretations to some of Manet's most complex works. Locke considers, for example, the impact of a father-son drama rooted in a closely guarded family secret: the adultery of Manet père and the status of Léon Leenhoff. Her nuanced exploration of the implications of this story--that Manet in fact married his father's mistress--makes us look afresh at even well-known paintings such as Olympia. This book sheds new light on Manet's infamous interest in gypsies, street musicians, and itinerants as Locke analyzes the activities of Manet's father as a civil judge. She also reexamines the close friendship between Manet and the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who married Manet's brother. Morisot becomes the subject of a series of meditations on the elusiveness of the self, the transience of identity, and conflicting concerns with appearances and respectability. Manet and the Family Romance offers an entirely new set of arguments about the cultural forces that shaped these alluring paintings.

"William Herbert (1580-1630), third earl of Pembroke, and Lady Mary Wroth (1587?-1653?) were first cousins, the nephew and niece of Sir Philip Sidney, whose family was one of remarkable literary and political importance. Herbert was a poet, a voluminous letter writer, and one of the Jacobean court's richest and most powerful courtiers and politicians. Wroth was arguably the most important woman writer of the period; she authored the first Petrarchan poetic sequence, the first prose romance, and one of the first plays in English by a woman. In addition to their connections as cousins and as writers, they were lovers and the parents of two illegitimate children." "The Sidney Family Romance is both a "cultural biography" and a symptomatic reading of the sexual and textual relationships of Herbert and Wroth. Waller's analysis of their letters and literary works relies on a variety of critical apparatuses - social history, current political and social theories of the Jacobean period, and most notably (feminist) psychoanalytic theory. In both his biographical information and interpretive comments, Waller focuses on subject construction and gender construction of the early modern period, to find that Herbert's poems proceed from his life at court to engage in the gender politics of Petrarchan poetry, while Wroth's work proceeds from her disempowered position to project a desire for an autonomy which would lead to mutuality between the sexes." "Waller tries to find ways of analyzing the "inner lives" of his subjects, in the absence of direct evidence, and with a paucity of documentation. He examines historical documents, including the writings of the two cousins, and recent historical research, along with contemporary studies of family interactions and gender construction and detailed case histories drawn from nearly a century of clinical and therapeutic studies. The author concludes with a discussion of the crisis of gender in the seventeenth century as a contemporary crisis as well." "Family history has long been central to Renaissance studies. The Sidney Family Romance proceeds far beyond any previous works in bringing to bear the very rich and complicated network of ideas, observations, and literary images in the works of Herbert and Wroth."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Drawing on Habermas and Freud as well as historians of the family, Daniels takes up the case of three women novelists each writing at a key moment in the parallel development of the novel genre and the modern family. She demonstrates that these writers - confronted with ever more reified exclusion from public life, and relegated to narrowly defined domestic roles - intervened in and subverted the process in their novels. Daniels shows that women writers used the novel first to imagine different social rules that might define alternative kinship systems (Graffigny), and later to find - and create - loopholes within a firmly entrenched system of official and unofficial law (Charriere and Sand)." "Spanning a crucial period in the emergence of modernity, this interdisciplinary study addresses problems in French literary and social history, gender studies, and the history of mentalites."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Beyond the Family Romance explores parallels between Pascoli's work and such writers as Tarchetti, Boito, Poe, and Invernizio.

This fascinating book, which presents an early psychoanalyst’s session-by-session notes on a case of hysteria caused by severe sexual trauma and incest, offers a vivid portrait of psychoanalytic practice in the second decade of the twentieth century. Accompanying these notes are insightful commentaries by Elizabeth Lunbeck and Bennett Simon that situate the case historically and throw light on the many difficulties that both analyst and patient encountered in the treatment. The book will be of great interest to students of the history of psychoanalysis and other psychological therapies, to those interested in the history of women and gender, and to clinicians struggling with the treatment of severely traumatized patients today.

This book explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. It traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print, grappling with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.

Uses 19th and 20th-century Irish Gothic literary texts to argue that capitalism, the nuclear patriarchal family and Protestantism coincided with and reinforced the conditions for the plantation of Ireland and the colonization which followed.

00 The enigma of Thomas Chatterton is investigated by Louise J. Kaplan, who untangles the counterfeiter from the artist, the troubled adolescent from the visionary poet, as she recreates the short life of a fatherless boy who found an authentic voice only in the realm of his imaginings. The enigma of Thomas Chatterton is investigated by Louise J. Kaplan, who untangles the counterfeiter from the artist, the troubled adolescent from the visionary poet, as she recreates the short life of a fatherless boy who found an authentic voice only in the realm of his imaginings.