Melanie Klein holds a unique place in psychoanalytic history and is known for having radically extended the scope of both theory and practice in the field. The essays in Reading Melanie Klein have been chosen to reflect the most innovative work on Kleinian thought in recent years and respond to the upsurge in interest in her work among clinicians and academics.
In explaining the central tenets of Klein's thought and providing an introduction to the diversity of current work in this field, the book will act as a catalyst for debate and dialogue not only within the psychoanalytic community but also across social, critical and cultural studies.

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Kleinian psychoanalysis has recently experienced a renaissance in academic and clinical circles. This text responds to the upsurge of interest in her work by bringing together innovative and challenging essays on Kleinian thought since the the late-1970s. The work recontextualizes Melanie Klein to the more well-known works of Freud and Lacan and disproves the long-held claim that her psychoanalysis is both too normative and too conservative for critical consideration. The essays address Klein's distinctive readings of the unconscious and phantasy, her tenacious commitment to the death drive, her fecund notions of anxiety, projection and projective identification and, most famously, her challenge to Freud's Oedipus complex and theories of sexual difference. The authors demonstrate that not only is it possible to rethink the epistemological basis of Kleinian theory, rendering it as vital as those of Freud and Lacan, but also that her psychoanalysis can engage in dialogue with diverse disciplines such as politics, ethics and literary theory. This collection should be a valuable addition to the scholarship on Melaine Klein and catalyst for further debate not only within the psychoanaly

Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

This bold new take on the life and ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt explores her lessons for living in an age of uncertainty 'Exhilarating, brilliant and utterly original' PHILIPPE SANDS 'Witty, moving and inspiring. An extraordinary book' SARAH CHURCHWELL The violent unease of today's world would have been all too familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration, the banality of evil: she had lived through them all. Born in the first decade of the last century, Arendt escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of the world's most influential - and controversial - public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. In place of the forces of darkness and insanity, she pitched a politics of plurality, spontaneity and defiance. Loving the world, Arendt taught, meant finding the courage to protect it. Written with passion and authority, Lyndsey Stonebridge's We Are Free to Change the World illuminates Arendt's life and work and its urgent dialogue with our troubled present. It is a clarion call for each of us to think our way, as Hannah Arendt did-unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly-through our own unpredictable times.

A bold and accessible argument for the moral and political value of literature in rightless times. The obvious humanity of books would seem to make literature and human rights natural allies. But what is the real connection between literature and human rights? In this short polemical book, Lyndsey Stonebridge shows how the history of human rights owes much to the creative imagining of writers. Yet, she argues, it is not enough to claim that literature is the empathetic wing of the human rights movement. At a time when human rights are so blatantly under attack, the writers we need how are the political truthtellers, the bold callers out of easy sympathy and comfortable platitudes.

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representation Places refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities research Brings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politics The refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness. Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

This text offers a perspective on the history of our fascination with culture's discontents and describes the continuing importance of psychoanalysis in cultural studies.

Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg
Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces a critical aesthetics of judgement in postwar writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. Bringing together literary-legal theory with trauma studies, The Judicial Imagination argues that today we have much to learn from these writers' impassioned scepticism about the law's ability to legislate for the territorial violence of our times.
Key Features
*Returns to the work of Hannah Arendt as the starting point for a new theorisation of the relation between law and trauma
* Provides a new context for understanding the continuities between late modernism and postwar writing through a focus on justice and human rights
*Offers a model of reading between history, law and literature which focuses on how matters of style and genre articulate moral, philosophical and political ambiguities and perplexities
*Makes a significant contribution to the rapidly developing fields of literary-legal and human rights studies

A bold and accessible argument for the moral and political value of literature in rightless times. The obvious humanity of books would seem to make literature and human rights natural allies. But what is the real connection between literature and human rights? In this short polemical book, Lyndsey Stonebridge shows how the history of human rights owes much to the creative imagining of writers. Yet, she argues, it is not enough to claim that literature is the empathetic wing of the human rights movement. At a time when human rights are so blatantly under attack, the writers we need how are the political truthtellers, the bold callers out of easy sympathy and comfortable platitudes.

In 1944 the political philosopher and refugee, Hannah Arendt wrote: 'Everywhere the word 'exile' which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.' Today's refugee 'crisis' has its origins in the political-and imaginative-history of the last century. Exiles from other places have often caused trouble for ideas about sovereignty, law and nationhood. But the meanings of exile changed dramatically in the twentieth century. This book shows just how profoundly the calamity of statelessness shaped modern literature and thought. For writers such as Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Simone Weil, among others, the outcasts of the twentieth century raised vital questions about sovereignty, humanism and the future of human rights. Placeless People argues that we urgently need to reconnect with the moral and political imagination of these first chroniclers of the placeless condition.