In September 1993, Israel and the PLO signed their first peace treaty; in April 1994, South Africa held its first nonracial elections. Jacqueline Rose argues here for the importance of these two arenas of historic conflict to the English literary and cultural imagination and to the new disciplinary boundaries of the humanities today. As in her previous books, her fundamental question is the place of fantasy in public and private identities. But in States of Fantasy she pushes her investigation into what at first glance seem unlikely places. In fact, as she convincingly demonstrates, nowhere...

This book identifies the origin, the development and, ultimately, the success of the Irish literary tradition in English as one of the first literatures that is both national and colonial. It demonstrates the remarkable relationships between works as diverse as Joyce's Dubliners and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the worlds of the French Revolution and the Irish famine. Deane also shows how almost all the activities of Irish print culture--novels, songs, typefaces, historical analyses, poems--struggle within the limits imposed by its inheritance.