This study suggests that it was the representation of anxiety, rather than trauma and memory, that emerged most forcefully in mid-century wartime culture. Thinking about anxiety, Lyndsey Stonebridge argues, was a way of imagining how it might be possible to stay within a history that frequently undermined a sense of self and agency.

Kleinian psychoanalysis has recently experienced a renaissance in academic and clinical circles. Reading Melanie Klein responds to the upsurge of interest in her work by bringing together the most innovative and challenging essays on Kleinian thought from the last two decades. The book features material which appears here for the first time in English, and several newly written chapters.
Reading Melaine Klein recontextualizes Klein to the more well-known works of Freud and Lacan and disproves the long-held claim that her psychoanalysis is both too normative and too...

Freud's account of the sublimated drives at work beneath the surfaces of advanced societies, alongside the modernist fictions of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Woolf and others, both reflected and inaugurated a strain of modernism preoccupied with the darkest elements of the human psyche. In The Destructive Element Lyndsey Stonebridge examines the career and legacy of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as a lens through which to examine the 20th century's fascination with death drives, the sublimation of civilization's discontents and the socialization of children--fascinations that would surface...

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of essays offers a wide-ranging and provocative reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. The book identifies continuities of preoccupation - with national identity, historiography and the challenge to literary form presented by public and private violence - that span the entire century.

Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg
Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces a critical aesthetics of judgement in postwar writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. Bringing together...

'In the destructive element immerse.' These words from Joseph Conrad's Stein in Lord Jim cast a shadow over twentieth-century literature. At the same time, Freud's bleak prognosis of culture's discontents left a psychoanalysis with a legacy that found one of its most profound realisations in the play-rooms of British child psychoanalysis. In this book, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers a new perspective on the history of our fascination with culture's discontents by returning to British psychoanalysis and second-wave modernism.