Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity: In the Garden of the Uncanny is at once a model of literary interpretation and a psycho-critical reading of Hemingway's life and art. This book is a provocative and theoretically sophisticated inquiry into the traumatic origins of the creative impulse and the dynamics of identity formation in Hemingway. Building on a body of wound-theory scholarship, the book seeks to reconcile the tensions between opposing Hemingway camps, while moving beyond these rivalries into a broader analysis of the relationship between trauma, identity formation and art in Hemingway.

The Gardens of desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matericidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust's work. The book moves beyond traditional Feudian readings of Proust to consider the theories of Otto Rank, Jacques Derrida, and others, and provides provocative readings of the "privileged moments" that comprise many of the work's "critical cruxes," as well as a thought-provoking rereading of the novel's ending. Both elegant and accessible, this book boldly explores the violence of desire as it relates not only to Proust's narrator, but also to Proustian criticism itself, with its own violent desire to appropriate the essence of Proust's masterpiece.