Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture

Did people in early modern Europe have a concept of an inner self? Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural, and history scholars to answer this intriguing question. Through a synthesis of historicism and psychoanalytic criticism, the contributors explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union of history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as "fetishes and Renaissances," "the cartographic unconscious," and "the topographic imaginary," these essays move beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe.
Contributors: Ann Rosalind Jones, Peter Stallybrass, James R. Siemon, John Guillory, Eric Wilson, Karen Newman, Tom Conley, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Mazzio, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Jonathan Goldberg, Douglas Trevor, Kathryn Schwarz, David Hillman, Marjorie Garber.

First published in 2000. Did people in early modern Europe have a concept of an inner self? Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural, and history scholars to answer this intriguing question. Through a synthesis of historicism and psychoanalytic criticism, the contributors explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union of history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as "fetishes and Renaissances," "the cartographic unconscious," and "the topographic imaginary," these essays move beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe.

I Dreams of History An Introduction FIELDING QUESTIONS 2 Fetishisms and Renaissances 3 Dreams of Field Early Modern (Dis)Positions 4 Toward a Topographic Imaginary Early Modern Paris 5 "To Please the Wiser Sort" Violence and Philosophy in Hamlet 6 Abel Drugger's Sign and the Fetishes of no Material Culture GRAPHIC IMAGINATIONS 7 Erotic Islands Contours of Villon's Printed Testament (1489), 8 The Interpretation of Dreams, circa 1610, 9 The Melancholy of Print Love's Labour's Lost 10 George Herbert and the Scene of Writing DEPTH PERCEPTIONS 11 The Anus in Coriolanus 12 Breaking the Mirror Stage 13 The Inside Story 14 Sorcery and Subjectivity in Early Modern Discourses of Witchcraft LEGACIES, 15 Weeping for Hecuba 16 Second-Best Bed

Carla Mazzio is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. She is the coeditor of The Body in Parts (Routledge, 1997) and Social Control and the Arts (1991). Douglas Trevor is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa.