In 'Poetic License, ' Perloff insists that despite the recent interest in 'opening up the canon, ' our understanding of poetry and poetics is all too often rutted in conventional notions of the lyric that shed little light on what poets and artists are actually doing today.

The book explores the links between mythic and rituals, arguing that the connectedness with ritual endows a story with a mythic essence. Detailed discussions of various rituals exemplify the major theoretical discourse. The book is of interest to scholars in the areas of religious studies, the anthropology of religion, and Halakhah (law and ritual).

Object relations theory has caused a fundamental reorientation of psychodynamic thought. In Object Relations Theory and Practice, Dr. David E. Scharff acclimates readers to the language and culture of this therapeutic perspective and provides carefully selected excerpts from seminal theorists as well as explanations of their thinking and clinical experience. He offers readers an unparalleled resource for understanding object relations psychotherapy and theory and applying it to the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The book's sequence establishes the centrality of relationships in this theory: the internalization of experience with parents, splitting, projective identification, the role of the relationship between mother and young child in development, and transference and countertransference in the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. This book will introduce students to the basics, to the widening scope of object relations theory, and to its application to psychoanalysis and individual, group, and family psychotherapy.

If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have any greater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of other women whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of the past? In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modern women's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach based in lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path, hierarchy, unity, resemblance, reflection, and the aesthetic-mimesis-that depends on these ideas. Through close readings of memoirs and fictions about mothers, Beizer explores how biographers of the women who came before rehearse and rewrite relationships to their own mothers biographically as they seek to appropriate the past in a hybrid genre she calls "bio-autography." Thinking through the Mothers features the work of George Sand and Colette and spans such varied figures as Gustave Flaubert, Julian Barnes, Louise Colet, Eunice Lipton, Vladimir Nabokov, Huguette Bouchardeau, and Christa Wolf. Beizer seeks an alternative to women's "salvation biography" or "resurrection biography" that might resist nostalgia, be attentive to silence, and reinvent the means to represent the lives of precursors without appropriating traditional models of genealogy.

The Secret Country is the first monograph on the work of the contemporary American novelist Jayne Anne Phillips. Through detailed and innovative textual analysis this study considers the southern aspects of Phillips' writing. Robertson demonstrates the importance of Phillips' place within the southern literary canon by identifying the echoes of William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Edgar Allan Poe that permeate her work. Phillips' complex attachments to a regional past are explored through both psychoanalytical and historical materialist approaches, revealing not only the writer's distinctly southern preoccupations, but also her reflections on contemporary American society. Tracing the family dynamics in Phillips' work from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this book examines the effects of increased modernization and capitalization on everyday interactions, and questions the nature of the author's backward glance to the past. This volume is of interest for a wide audience, particularly students and scholars of contemporary southern and American literature.

This book presents a variety of narratives on key elements of academic work, from data analysis, writing practices and engagement with the field. The authors discuss how elements of academic work and life – usually edited out of traditional research papers – can elicit important analytical insight. The book reveals how the unplanned, accidental and even obstructive events that often occur in research life, the ‘detours’, can potentially glean important results. The authors introduce the process of ‘writing-sharing-reading-writing’ as a way to expand the playground of research and inspire a culture in which ‘accountable’ research methodologies involve adventurousness and an element of uncertainty. Written by scholars from a range of different fields, academic levels and geographic locations, this unique book will offer significant insight to those from a range of academic fields.

How did urban Italy come to look the way it does today? This collection of essays assembles recent studies in architectural history and theory exploring the historical paradigms guiding architecture and landscape design between the world wars. The authors explore physical changes in townscapes and landscapes, covering a wide range of architectural designs from strict modernist solutions to variations of regionalism, mediterraneanism and national style from all over Italy. Specifically, the volume explains how conservation, restoration and town planning for historic areas led to the production of heritage, and elucidates the role played by architects like Marcello Piacentini, Innocenzo Sabbatini, Mario De Renzi and Giulio Ulisse Arata.

The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the historical, theoretical and applied forms of psychoanalytical criticism. This path-breaking Handbook offers students new ways of understanding the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, and of the social, cultural and political possibilities of psychoanalytic critique. The book offers students and professionals clear and concise chapters on the development of psychoanalysis, introducing key theories that have influenced debates over the psyche, desire and emotion in the social sciences and humanities. There are substantive chapters on classical Freudian theory, Kleinian and Bionian theory, object-relations psychoanalysis, Lacanian and post-Lacanian approaches, feminist psychoanalysis, as well as postmodern trends in psychoanalysis. There is a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to psychoanalytic critique, with contributions drawing from developments in sociology, politics, history, cultural studies, women’s studies and architecture.

Believers and teachers of faith regularly know the in-breaking of God's Spirit in their midst, when revelatory experiencing unexpectedly shifts habits of thinking, feeling, and doing toward more life-giving ways of being and becoming. When the moment is right, Spirit breathes new life into dry bones. Though religious educators have much practical wisdom about facilitating learning that is creative and transformative, sharper concepts, cases, and theory can help them do it more critically and assist learners to practice openness to wonder, surprise, and authenticity. The Grace of Playing explains how we can create the conditions for revelatory experiencing by understanding it in light of playing. The notion of playing "as if" can be powerfully reclaimed from ecclesial ambivalence, casual speech, and commercial interests that often lead playing to be associated with childishness, frivolity, or entertainment. This book theorizes adults playing for the sake of faith, drawing on D. W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory, a revision of Jurgen Moltmann's theology of play, biblical texts, medieval devotional practices, as well as art and aesthetics that help local faith communities engage in theological reflection. Communal forms of playing in/at God's new creation provide insights into pedagogies in which learners are creating and are created anew.

Both Hegel's philosophy and psychoanalytic theory have profoundly influenced contemporary thought, but they are traditionally seen to work in separate rather than intersecting universes. This book offers a new interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and brings it into conversation the work of two of the best-known contemporary psychoanalysts, Christopher Bollas and André Green. Hegel and Psychoanalysis centers a consideration of the Phenomenology on the figure of the Unhappy Consciousness and the concept of Force, two areas that are often overlooked by studies which focus on the master/slave dialectic. This book offers reasons for why now, more than ever, we need to recognize how concepts of intersubjectivity, Force, the Third, and binding are essential to an understanding of our modern world. Such concepts can allow for an interrogation of what can be seen as the profoundly false and constructed senses of community and friendship created by social networking sites, and further an idea of a "global community," which thrives at the expense of authentic intersubjective relations.