The Unconscious in Literature

The Oedipus Complex, the Death Drive, and the Unsymbolic Void

Yasunori Sugimura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040296363
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book aims to investigate the unconscious in literature using Freudian and Lacanian psychology. The works of Thomas Hardy, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch are discussed from Chapter 1 through to Chapter 8. Based on the argument in these chapters, this volume considers the environmental problem by examining the unconscious in the literary texts, including poetry, in the light of philosophers and critics on ecology in Chapter 9. There is a focus on the Oedipus complex, the death drive, and the unsymbolic void, as they have much relevance to each other in the unconscious, and underlie the plots and leitmotifs of the literary texts discussed. The author, furthermore, carefully examines the complicated relationship between the unsymbolic void within nature and the unconscious of human beings in our environment.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Psychological Significance of the Double Ending in The Well-Beloved
• 2 The Internal Forces of the Plot in A Pair of Blue Eyes
• 3 The Symbolic Fixed and Dissolved in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• 4 A Reconsideration of the Dual Relationship and the Cosmic Perspective in Lord of the Flies
• 5 Nature and Human Beings in The Inheritors
• 6 The Black Hole and the Death Drive in Darkness Visible
• 7 The Unsymbolic Void amidst the Light in ‘Miss Pulkinhorn’
• 8 The Depiction of Nature and its Originality in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction
• 9 The Unrepresentable within Nature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index