This chapter considers H.D.’s translation of Euripides’s Ion (1937). H.D.’s Ion crystallizes her approach to Greek, redefining the practice of translation in the process; allows her to propose an alternative theory of psychic development contra Freud; and, finally, in its specific (mis)reading of the Euripidean play, foreshadows Pound’s treatment of Sophocles in Women of Trachis by making a strong case for the poetic and cultural relevance of Greek tragedy in the twentieth century. Pushing beyond accounts of the play available to her in the 1930s, H.D.’s interpretation of Euripides’ poetic strategies aligns with more recent scholarly accounts of his plays. Deploying differently the elements of commentary and translation in her multigeneric work, H.D. dramatizes both her own desire to believe in a triumphant narrative that would bind ancient and modern culture and would make poetry the cure or compensation for trauma, and the contingency or constructedness of such a position. The analysis of Ion is bookended by examinations of “Murex” (1926), and Trilogy (1944–46) that show the germination and evolution of the questions, ideas, and techniques that went into the translation of the play.

This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.

This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

This chapter considers the place of Sigmund Freud in the formation of the earliest historical questions raised about sexuality in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century psychiatric and sexological thought. It then considers a range of ways historical thinkers have used Freudian concepts, as well as the grounds on which such uses have often been explicitly rejected by others. It argues that the emergence of historiography of sexuality bears only a partial and largely indirect debt to Freud, who has less often served as a model of historical inquiry and more often served to define what one should not do. Freud is commonly attributed the status of having sown the seed that enabled historiography of sexuality to emerge globally by relativizing morality and denaturalizing sexual biology in the notion of polymorphous perversity. However, this endeavour was far from assimilable to the emerging norms of early-twentieth historical inquiry, with the result that the earliest histories of sexuality found little inspiration in Freudian thought. Post-World-War-Two uses of Freudian sexual concepts by the Frankfurt School philosophers to explain the origins of Nazism within the European Enlightenment have helped less to understand the sexual politics of Nazism or the anthropology of genocide than to malign sadomasochism.

The chapter uses a discussion of Pirandello’s theoretical essay On Humor to place his idea on comic literature in the broader contexts of his career, of international comic literary traditions, and of thought on humor in relation to contemporary developments in psychology, philosophy, and literature studies. The essay approaches On Humor as both a declaration of a personal poetics and a sort of manifesto, describing its structure, content, and the way Pirandello uses it to position his own work within – and sometimes opposed to – literary traditions in Italy and, in particular, the rest of Europe. A central point that emerges from the essay is how deeply attuned Pirandello was to international advances in various fields, responding to such figures as Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, even as he was particularly wedded to his Italian forebears.

One can ascribe a double origin to surrealism in 1924, André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism and Louis Aragon’s A Wave of Dreams. If one can see these texts as a double manifesto recapitulating previous experiments and launching a programme, they also plant the seeds for a later divergence. I locate the roots of the breakup between Aragon and Breton less in their politics than in opposed conceptions about the role of the novel and its power to explore the unconscious. Such a divergence is founded upon different interpretations of Freud’s concept of the unconscious. The two founders of surrealism could not agree about the place of a collective unconscious in a surrealist mythology, which can be verified by comparing Anicet and The Paris Peasant on the one hand, and Nadja on the other. I conclude by returning to Walter Benjamin’s critical assessment of surrealism. Halfway between Breton and Aragon, Benjamin identified some pitfalls in a surrealist mythology of the unconscious but intuited what could be gained from a writing capable of exploring reality and surreality together.

Readers of American literature increasingly already know something about the career of Cherokee writer and editor John Rollin Ridge. In the preface to his 2018 breakout novel There There, Tommy Orange offers readers his version of Ridge’s claim to fame: “The first novel by a Native person, and the first novel written in California, was written in 1854, by a Cherokee guy named John Rollin Ridge.”1 The novel Orange references is Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, a semifictional story of a Mexican war veteran driven to vengeance by the cruelty of white settlers. Although it did not sell well in Ridge’s lifetime, Penguin Random House’s new addition suggests that Ridge’s importance to college syllabi and American literary scholarship will only deepen in the years ahead. As Ridge’s biographer notes, while it failed to provide Ridge with the financial security he desired, the novel birthed a public interest in Joaquín Murieta’s story that has been with us ever since.2

This chapter explores different attempts at understanding antisemitism and engages with philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytical theories.

In Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs, three ‘Negresses’ magically appear at the moment that the speaker signs away his legal rights to life. This fantasy is an example of how actual bondage and historical slavery shape the sadomasochistic imagination. This chapter traces that imagination through poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, written at the height of Victorian sexology. It looks at the metaphor of the plough or the ploughman in relation to bondage and Hopkins’s class politics, and at the flagellation fantasies in Swinburne’s poetry (including his juvenile compositions), and the way that those poems fetishise the foot, mouth and ‘bum’. It discusses the theatricality and suspension of agency involved in masochism in relation to specific examples of colonial violence, to challenge the idea that the voluntary submission to constraint in radical sex practices can undermine forms of social domination.

This chapter discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts influenced the American popular Gothic during the post-war era. The 1950s and 1960s were what Nathan G. Hale has described as the ‘Golden Age of Popularization’ for psychoanalytic thought in the United States. The historical underpinnings of this psychoanalytic ‘boom’ period are discussed, with a focus upon the prominent place occupied by American ego psychology during this period. As argued, this influence soon permeated the ‘popular Gothic’ fiction of the era, which was characterised by texts which revolved around tensions rooted in the dysfunctional nuclear family, sexual and emotional repression, and unresolved childhood trauma. The work of authors such as Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, William March and Ira Levin is considered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the late 1970s ‘Satanic Panic’ scare, which drew upon both core psychoanalytic principles and the most lurid elements found in works of horror fiction such as Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971), severely damaged the movement’s reputation in the United States.

Photography played an increasingly significant role in surrealism in the 1920s and especially the 1930s, when the art form was becoming ever more popular across printed picture magazines and mass-media newspapers. During this time, the surrealists developed their own avant-garde uses of photography, turning it into both a surrealist art practice in its own right and as a means to represent the surrealist group and their interests. The chapter argues that the surrealists employed a diversity of photographic techniques and genres, and developed these in new ways, as demonstrated across their various activities in public forums, surrealist magazines, exhibitions and books. Since photography was situated clearly within the aims of the surrealist project, surrealist photography becomes both a reflection on and a means of constructing the images of their vision, desire, dreams and social ambitions, which were all too often at variance with the predominant social uses of photography.

The essay provides an overview of Wright’s engagement with psychoanalysis. It traces Wright’s literary adaptations of psychoanalysis from his first completed novel Lawd Today! to his later writings and surveys his collaborations with the German-American social psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham’s studies of matricide provided Wright with the material for his novel Savage Holiday (1954), which has long been recognized as his most explicitly psychoanalytic fiction. Wertham developed his theory of matricide partly through a critique of Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet and he repudiated Freud’s claim of the universality of the Oedipus complex. In contrast to the critical consensus that reads Savage Holiday as an orthodox depiction of an Oedipus complex, the essay traces the novel’s indebtedness to Wertham’s work and its relation to Wright’s anti-colonial nonfiction. Within these contexts, Savage Holiday appears as a critique, rather than an orthodox representation of Freudian psychoanalysis. Through this rereading of the novel, the social history of matriarchy emerges as an important theme of Wright’s writings of the 1950s.

Chapter 3 begins the introduction to Jan Assmann through material that is shared between him and Girard: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. This text stepped into a multi-century discourse that tried to abolish the monotheistic distinction between “Israel” vs. “Egypt.” But, contrary to simplistic readings of Freud as the enemy of religion, he ultimately argues (with mixed veracity) that monotheistic intolerance is a beneficial “progress in intellectuality.” This introduces much of Assmann’s topics: that is, comparing monotheism between Akhenaten and Egypt, Moses and Israel, and theorizing monotheism’s relationship to violence and politics.

This chapter traces the author’s intellectual and professional development, in both Taiwan and the USA, and describes how his lifelong search for a better understanding of the human mind sustained his fascination with the genesis of the thoughts of major schools of depth psychology, especially in the context of the life experiences of their founders. This search led to the realization of “wounded healer” as a unifying theme for the strivings and insights of these pioneers.

David J. Code explores the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune, a 1912 choreographic reworking of Claude Debussy’s orchestral Prélude (1894). He peels off layers of historical reference, looking backwards to Debussy and Stéphane Mallarmé from Faune’s 1912 Nijinskian embodiment. In the process, he questions the ballet’s accepted relationship to cubism in favour of a Matisse-inspired framework for understanding the underlying modernity of the Faun. With attention to scene and character types, structure and style, diegesis, eroticism and Freudian psychological interiority, Code highlights ways in which music and dance might both embody and subvert typically modernist modes of dramatic expression.

Sigmund Freud was a great collector of psychological examples, whether from his own life or those of others. This chapter concentrates on one example taken from his self-analysis – his forgetting the name of the artist ‘Signorelli’. He wrote three slightly differing descriptions of the episode, the most famous being the first chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. By examining Freud’s different accounts of this example, and by comparing them with his interpretations of analogous cases involving his patients, we can see how Freud’s analysis of the Signorelli incident both reveals and conceals. He fails to make obvious connections, especially those that might relate to his relations with his sister-in-law. The very act of analysing the episode and then immediately publishing that analysis may well have been a means of repressing a memory. By re-interpreting the incident in this way, it becomes an example of the way that someone can repress, or push from their mind, a guilty secret.