Academica Press, LLC

Forgetting Freud; is psychoanalysis in retreat?

Weatherill, a psychoanalyst with 25 years of experience, argues in these ten essays for a renewed engagement with psychoanalysis that goes beyond post-structural relativism, the crisis of meaning and academic parochialism. All the essays grow out of seminar and conference papers written over the last 15 years. They concern the orgiastic excess of capitalism, a critique of therapy culture, the loss of ethics with reference to Levinas, the erotic as understood by Bataille vis-a-vis the death-drive, the question of seduction, sexual enjoyment and sexual abuse in Nabokov's Lolita, a plea for a psychoanalysis based on Lacan AND Klein, and a critical take on queer-theory in psychoanalysis. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Belgravia; a London magazine, and the world of Anglo-Jewry, Jews, and Judaism, 1866-1899.

Morris' study May Elizabeth Braddon and the Jewish Questions: A Victorian English Novelist and the Worlds of Anglo-Jewry, Zionism and Judaism, 1859-1913 was published in 2011. Out of the research for that, she has produced this concordance to the magazine Belgravia: A London Magazine, which Braddon edited from November 1866 to February 1876. She cites articles and passages that refer not only to Jews and Jewish life in 19th-century London, but also to the Bible and other aspects of Jewish culture generally. There is no index. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Turning Victorian ladies into women; the life of Bessie Rayner Parkes, 1829-1925.

Bessie Rayner Parkes was editor of the English Woman's Journal, the premier women's rights publication in Britain, from 1858 to 1864. She also wrote an important pamphlet on reforming girls' education and founded a progressive, coeducational school. Although she was an ardent feminist in her youth, she later converted to Catholicism and removed herself from public life, while still continuing to publish poetry, biographies, memoirs, and children's books. The biography is written by one of Bessie Rayner Parkes's great-granddaughters, who is also a writer and a feminist. The author draws on an uncompleted manuscript by Bessie Rayner Parkes's daughter Marie Belloc Lowndes, plus letters, diaries, and published work by Bessie Rayner Parkes. The book includes b&w photos and illustrations, a genealogical chart, and a chronology. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)