How did psychoanalytic knowledge attain a dual status both as common sense about the -inner life- among the educated and as seemingly indispensable psychological expertise during the first half of the twentieth century? Combining approaches from literary studies and historical sociology, this book provides a groundbreaking cultural history of the strategies Freud employed in his writings and career to orchestrate public recognition of psychoanalyis and to shape its institutional identity. The author argues that a central element of Freud's institutionalization project was his theoretical...

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways that Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction associated with the growth of periodical publication in the nineteenth century but also the school subject we now know as English.Examining the full scope of Dickens's...

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways that Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction associated with the growth of periodical publication in the nineteenth century but also the school subject we now know as English.Examining the full scope of Dickens's...