Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English Utopian Literature

by Dan Mills

Overview

Theoretically informed scholarship on early modern English utopian literature has largely focused on Marxist interpretation of these texts in an attempt to characterize them as proto- Marxist. The present volume instead focuses on subjectivity in early modern English utopian writing by using these texts as case studies to explore intersections of the thought of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both Lacan and Foucault moved back and forth between structuralist and post-structuralist intellectual trends and ultimately both defy strict categorization into either camp. Although numerous studies have appeared that compare Lacan’s and Foucault’s thought, there have been relatively few applications of their thought together onto literature. By applying the thought of both theorists, who were not literary critics, to readings of early modern English utopian literature, this study will, on the one hand, describe the formation of utopian subjectivity that is both psychoanalytically (Oedipal and pre-Oedipal) and socially constructed, and, on the other hand, demonstrate new ways in which the thought of Lacan and Foucault inform and complement each other when applied to literary texts. The utopian subject is a malleable subject, a subject whose linguistic, psychoanalytical subjectivity determines the extent to which environmental and social factors manifest in an identity that moves among Lacan’s Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000732009
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/13/2020
Series:	Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	274
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Dan Mills has an MA and PhD in English from Georgia State University, where he focused his studies on early modern English literature and theory and wrote his dissertation on early modern English utopian literature. He recently completed an MA in Latin at the University of Georgia. In addition to early modern English literature and theory, his research interests include bibliography and print culture, translation studies, and neo-Latin.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgements

SECTION 1: INTRODUCTORY MATTERS

Chapter 1
Introducing Utopia

Chapter 2
Utopian Studies, Modern and Early Modern: A Nice Place to Visit

Chapter 3
Lacan avec Foucault

Chapter 4
"If Only this were some day possible": The Execration, Consecration, and Catechization of Humanist Optimism in Thomas More’s Utopia

SECTION 2: the UTOPIAN symbolic
Chapter 5

Stealth Self on the Shelf: Surveillance, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Symbolic Subjectivity

Chapter 6

Power is Knowledge: Surveillance, Biopower and Linguistic Subjectivity in John Eliot’s Christian Commonwealth

Chapter 7

Linguistic Subjectivity and Linguistic Utopia in Francis Lodwick’s A Country not Named

SECTION 3: the UTOPIAN imaginary

Chapter 8

"Out of the Authority of the Arabians": Orientalism and Utopian Intellectual History in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

Chapter 9

Gerrard Winstanley’s Utopian Mission

Chapter 10

Margaret Cavendish’s Book of Imaginary Beings: Philosophical Animals and Physiognomic Philosophers in The Blazing World

SECTION 4: The Three UTOPIAN reals

Chapter 11
Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem and Geo-satirical Indictment of the English Crown

Chapter 12

James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana and Typographical Utopia

Chapter 13
Pornographic Miscegenation and Dystopic Apocalypse in Henry Neville's Isle of Pines

Chapter 14: CONCLUSIONS AND AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

BIBLIOGRAPHY