Joseph Adamson – författare

Offers a complex analysis of the psychodynamic role of shame in Melville's work, with detailed readings of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and "Billy Budd."This study offers a complex analysis of the psychodynamic role of shame in Melville's work, with detailed readings of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and "Billy Budd." Its concrete application of the rich analytic framework supplied by the work of such theorists as Heinz Kohut, Léon Wurmser, Silvan Tomkins, and Donald Nathanson implicitly challenges the contemporary reliance on an often abstract poststructuralist model of psychoanalysis. As a paradigmatic, coherent reading of the work of a single author, the book will appeal both to the many scholars interested in Melville's work and to anyone interested in psychoanalytic or psychological approaches to literature.

Explores the role of shame as an important affect in the complex psychodynamics of literary and philosophical works.The significance of shame as a critical human emotion has come to be recognized in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology. Scenes of Shame brings this body of theory to bear on literary and philosophical representations of shame. The contributors explore the role of shame as an important affect in the psychodynamics of a wide range of literary and philosophical works, including essays on Kierkegaard, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Faulkner, Sexton, and Toni Morrison. The book also includes an analysis of the problem of shame in student lifewriting in the classroom, and testifies to the importance of affect in philosophy and literature, as well as to the way in which imaginative writers can clarify and enrich our understanding of an emotion that, as Silvan Tomkins claims, "strikes deepest" into the human heart.

Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture was first published in 1976 and was soon recognized as one of his most influential works, reflecting an extensive development of Frye’s thoughts about romance as a literary form. This new edition in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series brings The Secular Scripture together with thirty shorter pieces pertaining to literary theory and criticism from the last fifteen years of Frye’s life.Frye’s study illuminates the enduring attraction and deep human significance of the romance genre in all its forms. He provides a unique perspective on popular fiction and culture and shows how romance forms have, by their very structural and conventional features, an ability to address both specific social concerns and deep and fundamental human concerns that span time and place. In distinguishing popular from elite culture, Frye insists that they are both ultimately two aspects of the same “human compulsion to create in the face of chaos.” The additional late writings reflect Frye’s sense at the time that he was working “toward some kind of final statement,” which eventually saw the light of day, only months before his death, as Words with Power (1990).

This book, first published in 1988, does not concern the theory of poetry so much as the poetry of theory: a poetry that theorizes, that has a "view" on things, that thinks. What or what things does poetry think about, and what do we mean by thinking? The author attempts to answer these questions by examining the work of three poets – Wallace Stevens, César Vallejo, and René Char – and reflects upon the poetry itself. This title will be of interest to students of literature and literary theory.