Juliet Flower MacCannell – författare

The Regime of the Brother is one of the first attempts to challenge modernity on its own terms. Using the work of Lacan, Kristeva and Freud, Juliet MacCannell confronts the failure of modernity to bring about the social equality promised by the Enlightenment. On the verge of its destruction, the Patriarchy has reshaped itself into a new, and often more oppressive regime: that of the Brother. Examining a range of literary and social texts - from Rousseau''s Confessions to Richardson''s Clarissa and from Stendhal''s De L''Amour to James''s What Maisie Knew and Jean Rhys''s Wide Sargasso Sea - MacCannell illustrates a history of the suppression of women, revealing the potential for a specifically feminine alternative.

The Regime of the Brother is one of the first attempts to challenge modernity on its own terms. Using the work of Lacan, Kristeva and Freud, Juliet MacCannell confronts the failure of modernity to bring about the social equality promised by the Enlightenment. On the verge of its destruction, the Patriarchy has reshaped itself into a new, and often more oppressive regime: that of the Brother. Examining a range of literary and social texts - from Rousseau''s Confessions to Richardson''s Clarissa and from Stendhal''s De L''Amour to James''s What Maisie Knew and Jean Rhys''s Wide Sargasso Sea - MacCannell illustrates a history of the suppression of women, revealing the potential for a specifically feminine alternative.

It could be argued that the influence of Lacan on modern literary studies has been greater than anyone’s. Lacan has historicised the universal or mythic perceptions of Freud, and thus lent a new status to literature as a cultural artefact. This book, originally published in 1986, aims to delineate the trends in the uses made of Lacan today; to examine the theoretical substructure by which his work is accommodated to literature; and to analyse the way in which his work ‘models’ the formal relation of the literary text to other texts, to history and to politics.