Pamela Thurschwell

The work of Sigmund Freud has penetrated almost every area of literary theory and cultural studies, as well as contemporary culture. Pamela Thurschwell explains and contextualises psychoanalytic theory and its meaning for modern thinking. This updated second edition explores developments and responses to Freud’s work, including: tracing contexts and developments of Freud’s work over the course of his careerexploring paradoxes and contradictions in his writingfocusing on psychoanalysis as an interpretative strategy, paying special attention to its impact on literary and cultural theoryexamining the recent backlash against Freud and arguing for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis.Encouraging and preparing readers to approach Freud’s original texts, this guide ensures that readers of all levels will find Freud accessible, challenging and of continued relevance.

The work of Sigmund Freud has penetrated almost every area of literary theory and cultural studies, as well as contemporary culture. Pamela Thurschwell explains and contextualises psychoanalytic theory and its meaning for modern thinking. This updated second edition explores developments and responses to Freud’s work, including: tracing contexts and developments of Freud’s work over the course of his careerexploring paradoxes and contradictions in his writingfocusing on psychoanalysis as an interpretative strategy, paying special attention to its impact on literary and cultural theoryexamining the recent backlash against Freud and arguing for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis.Encouraging and preparing readers to approach Freud’s original texts, this guide ensures that readers of all levels will find Freud accessible, challenging and of continued relevance.

Adolescence has been codified as an unpredictable, experimental and liminal time. Teenage Time reads this phase as queer in its framing and disruption of developmental narratives of modernity, showing that the identity of the teenager, as it has been culturally perceived in different epochs developing since the 1940s, has shaped the temporal imaginary of the 20th and 21st century. From the conception of the teenager after the Second World War, through notions of rebellion and consumption peaking in the 1980s and 1990s, to representations of their precarious futures amidst the political, social, economic and environmental uncertainties of today, Pamela Thurschwell exposes British and American representations of the adolescent as both destructive and recursive in their disturbance of narrative and teleology in literature, film and sub-cultural history. Calling on theories of queer temporality, time studies, psychoanalysis and Marxist accounts of modernity, this book traces how the teenager is 'out of time' and time-travelling, commodified, anarchic, futureless, precarious with an uneven distribution of time in relation to race, and how they confront dystopias in Young Adult catastrophe literature. Covering a wide range of works, this book features contemporary and YA fiction such as The Member of the Wedding, American Pastoral, Sula, The Hate U Give, The Fault in Our Stars, How I Live Now, Never Let Me Go, The Hunger Games and They Both Die at the End, and films including Donnie Darko, The Breakfast Club, Back to the Future, Say Anything and Ghost World. Original and conceptually sophisticated, Thurschwell demonstrates how adolescence is formed in dialogue with a crisis in and of historical time, revealing the promise and destruction of the modern teenager.

In this 2001 book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people: both seemed to involve 'magical thinking'. Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis. This study offers provocative interpretations of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific culture in relation to psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural history.

In this 2001 book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people: both seemed to involve 'magical thinking'. Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis. This study offers provocative interpretations of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific culture in relation to psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural history.