The Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centring on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.

This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem of how to write 'life itself.' Ghost stories are split between an ironic, often parodic reference to Gothic style and an evocation of 'life itself,' an implicit repudiation of all literary style. Reading the ghost story as both a guest and a host story, this book traces the ghost as a disruptive figure in the 'hospitable' space of narrative from Maturin, Poe and Dickens to the fin de siecle, and then on into the twentieth century.

This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem of how to write life itself. Ghost stories are split between an ironic, often parodic reference to Gothic style and an evocation of life itself, an implicit repudiation of all literary style. Reading the ghost story as both a "guest" and a "host" story, this book traces the ghost as a disruptive figure in the hospitable space of narrative from Maturin, Poe and Dickens to the "fin de si cle," and then on into the twentieth century.

'Essays on Otherness offers the most original, philosophical sophisticated, and far-reaching critical reading of Freud's metapsychology since Lacan. Exegetically scrupulous and rigorously argued, these essays go straight to the heart of the psychoanalytical enterprise.' - Peter Osborne, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University

'[Laplanche's] philosophical and psychoanalytical studies are now becoming increasingly drawn upon by cultural theorists and critics, and this work is helped enormously by the publication of Essays on Otherness and the comprehensive and illuminating introduction by John Fletcher.' - New Formations

'[Laplanche's] philosophical and psychoanalytical studies are now becoming increasingly drawn upon by cultural theorists and critics, and this work is helped enormously by the publication of Essays on Otherness and the comprehensive and illuminating introduction by John Fletcher.' - New Formations

The Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centring on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.

In this lucid and compelling analysis of Lacan's twenty-third seminar, "Le Sinthome," Roberto Harari points to new psychoanalytic pathways that lead beyond Freudian oedipal dynamics.
Lacan's seminar measures the boundaries between creativity and neurosis. We learn how poetry and wordplay may offer alternatives to neurotic pain and even psychotic delusions, with Joyce as our subject.
This new translation makes the intricacies of Lacan's seminar available to the English-speaking world for the first time. The author's accessible, vigorous prose explains the nuances of Lacanian theory with perfect clarity.
In the extraordinary encounter between Lacan and Joyce, Harari reveals unexpected affinities between them both as theorists and writers. It illustrates how literature is the aesthetic domain that is closest to the analytic experience.

From its very beginning, psychoanalysis sought to incorporate the aesthetic into its domain. Despite Joyce's deliberate attempt in his writing to resist this powerful hermeneutic, his work has been confronted by a long tradition of psychoanalytic readings. Luke Thurston argues that this very antagonism holds the key to how psychoanalytic thinking can still open up new avenues in Joycean criticism and literary theory. In particular, Thurston shows that Jacques Lacan's response to Joyce goes beyond the 'application' of theory: rather than diagnosing Joyce's writing or claiming to have deciphered its riddles, Lacan seeks to understand how it can entail an unreadable signature, a unique act of social transgression that defies translation into discourse. Thurston imaginatively builds on Lacan's work to illuminate Joyce's place in a wide-ranging literary genealogy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde. This study should be essential reading for all students of Joyce, literary theory and psychoanalysis.

From its very beginning, psychoanalysis sought to incorporate the aesthetic into its domain. Despite Joyce's deliberate attempt in his writing to resist this powerful hermeneutic, his work has been confronted by a long tradition of psychoanalytic readings. Luke Thurston argues that this very antagonism holds the key to how psychoanalytic thinking can still open up new avenues in Joycean criticism and literary theory. In particular, Thurston shows that Jacques Lacan's response to Joyce goes beyond the 'application' of theory: rather than diagnosing Joyce's writing or claiming to have deciphered its riddles, Lacan seeks to understand how it can entail an unreadable signature, a unique act of social transgression that defies translation into discourse. Thurston imaginatively builds on Lacan's work to illuminate Joyce's place in a wide-ranging literary genealogy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde. This study should be essential reading for all students of Joyce, literary theory and psychoanalysis.