This is the first study of Freud's texts to incorporate the intellectual findings of Adolf Grünbaum, the archival material published by Jeffrey Masson (the recently published correspondence between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess) and Lewin's profile of long-term cocaine users. Wilcocks challenges literary critics who have granted Freud's writings "scientific" status, and claims that the works are no more than the rhetorical deceptions of a talented writer. Through a careful examination of the Freud-Fliess correspondence and of Freud's case histories, and through a novel comparison of Freud's rhetorical devices with Poe's rhetoric of deception in the essay "Maelzel's Chess-Player," Wilcocks reveals that Freud was a talented but disturbed master of deception, including self-deception.

Unlike many writers from the former GDR, Christoph Hein's reputation and standing - and his creativity - have remained intact despite the demise of the GDR in 1989-90. Christoph Hein in Perspective brings together essays by both established and younger scholars from Britain, Germany and the USA which together cover a wide spectrum of his work, from the early writings of the 1970s to the play In Acht und Bann of 1999 and including his speeches and essays as well as all his major prose works. There is a marked emphasis in the volume on Hein's post-Wende output, with about half the contributions focusing primarily on this period. Another feature is the diversity of perspectives from which the works are examined: historical and political viewpoints are complemented by formal and comparative studies as well as by gender-based perspectives. The volume includes additionally the first published English translation of what is for many Hein's most successful work for the stage, Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q of 1983 ('The True Story of Ah Q'). The volume as a whole should be of interest to scholars concerned with the GDR and with contemporary German culture, to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and also the others interested in the history and culture of Germany since 1945. Six of the essays are in English and six in German.

Europe and the United States now confront many of the same unresolved issues of nationalist, religious, racial, and ethnic intolerance. The book addresses the question: How can the humanistic disciplines and social sciences play a role in a political transformation or address cultural difference? This “difference,” the other, may be a racial, ethnic, gendered, religious, or colonial Other. Contributors to this book focus on the serious political questions posed by the problems of strangeness, “the other,” in the present climate of accelerating social change and global shifts in political power.

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters, a genius who was tragically misunderstood in his lifetime. He was a seminal figure in the development of science fiction and the detective story, and exerted a great influence on Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Charles Baudelaire, who championed him long before Poe was appreciated in his own country. Baudelaire's enthusiasm brought Poe a wide audience in Europe, and his writing came to have enormous importance for modern French literature. This edition includes his most well-known works--"The Raven," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Annabel Lee," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--as well as less-familiar stories, poems, and essays.