Peter D. Mathews – författare

This book sets out to determine the validity of an accusation made against Jacques Lacan by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 1989.

Rodney Hall and the Global Imagination offers the first comprehensive study of one of Australia's most innovative and overlooked writers.Spanning seven decades of poetry, fiction, and cultural advocacy, this book uncovers the intellectual and artistic currents that shaped Hall's creative philosophy—from Vico's poetic wisdom and Graves's mythic thinking to Joycean experiment and Latin American fabulism. It demonstrates how Hall uses labyrinths, masks, myth, and imagination to challenge modern habits of rationality and to confront the unresolved legacies of colonisation, captivity, and national storytelling. Drawing on archival materials, forgotten early works, and new biographical insights, the study restores Hall's vital role in Australian literary history while situating his achievement within global debates on postcolonialism, philosophy, and aesthetics.Accessible and wide-ranging, this book is attuned to readers both inside and outside the academy. It reveals Hall as a writer whose work compels us to rethink how stories are made, how history is remembered, and how the imagination shapes the world—offering fresh perspectives on creativity, memory, and the power of narrative to transform our understanding of culture and identity.

Regency England was a pivotal time of political uncertainty, with a changing monarchy, the Napoleonic Wars, and a population explosion in London. In Susanna Clarke's fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the era is also witness to the unexpected return of magic. Locating the consequences of this eruption of magical unreason within the context of England's imperial history, this study examines Merlin and his legacy, the roles of magicians throughout history, the mythology of disenchantment, the racism at work in the character of Stephen Black, the meaning behind the fantasy of magic's return, and the Englishness of English magic itself. Looking at the larger historical context of magic and its links to colonialism, the book offers both a fuller understanding of the ethical visions underlying Clarke's groundbreaking novel of madness intertwined with magic, while challenging readers to rethink connections among national identity, rationality, and power.