The Function of Symptoms in British Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards.

This volume of eight essays written by French scholars analyzes Daniel Mendelsohn's first three volumes of nonfiction (The Elusive Embrace, 1999, The Lost, 2006, and An Odyssey, 2017) as well as an illustrated interview (2019) in which Mendelsohn tackles various aspects of his work as a literary and cultural critic, as a professor of classical literature, as a translator, and as a memoirist. The essays discussing The Elusive Embrace (1999) argue that, in addition to offering a subtle reflection on sexual identity and genres, Mendelsohn's first volume already broadens his topic and patiently weaves links between ancient and present times, feeding his meditation with his knowledge of Greek culture and myths-a natural movement of back and forth which would become his signature. The Lost (2006), his much acclaimed investigation into the death by bullet of six of his family members during the Shoah, is analyzed as a close-up on the disappearance of a whole world, the unspeakability of which Mendelsohn addressed through intertwining several languages, linguistic echoes, and biblical references. Finally, Mendelsohn's recent An Odyssey (2017) is studied as a brilliant musing on teaching Homer's masterpiece while building up a memoir on his declining father sitting among his students and allowing Homer's universal questions and lessons to enlighten a father and son's last journey.