Figuring Lacan

Jacques Lacan's ideas have shaped literary studies more than those of almost any other thinker. By recasting Freud's supposedly timeless and mythic insights as products of history, he gave literature a fresh standing as a cultural artefact. First published in 1986, this study maps how critics have put Lacan to work and what they have made of him. It also looks at the theoretical groundwork that allows his thought to be applied to literary texts, and at how his framework accounts for the formal connections between a literary work and other texts, history and politics.