The first comprehensive look at how Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis shaped each other

Novel Relations engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures-characters, narrators, authors, and other readers-shape and structure us too. For Christoff, novels are charged relational fields.

Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Christoff shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality-including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies.

The first book to examine at length the connections between British psychoanalysis and Victorian fiction, Novel Relations describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

About the Author
Alicia Mireles Christoff is assistant professor of English at Amherst College.

Reviews
"Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Award, Northeast Victorian Studies Association"
"Winner of the Courage to Dream Book Prize, American Psychoanalytic Association"
"Christoff writes beautifully and passionately, and her interpretations are fascinating."---Jane O'Grady, Times Higher Education
"A fascinating, deeply rewarding study, which helps us think afresh about how the Victorian novel alerts us to our most vital shared experiences."---Fraser Riddell, Victoriographies



Book Information
ISBN 9780691234595
Author Alicia Mireles Professor Christoff
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press