This volume constitutes both an attack on modern left wing literary theory - the main product of the last Marxist renaissance in the past thirty years - and a defence of the one element of Marxism which, in the general collapse, modern theorists have been happiest to lose, its economic materialism. It traces Marxist theory from its beginnings in Hegelian idealism to its end in Althusser's structuralism, and concludes that while Marxist economics will not work, and the type of revolution prophesied was fantasy, the principle of historical materialism remains intact and defensible. This will be...

At a time when psychoanalysis is attacked by biologists, psychologists and literary critics alike, this book offers a radical defence.

Literature, Psychoanalysis and the New Sciences of Mind gives a clear introduction to the theories of Freud and Jung, the strange linguistic rewriting of Freud by Jacques Lacan. It explores the extraordinary variety of ways in which these writings have been applied to literature and literary theory. But for the first time, they are put in the context of recent biological theories of mind and sexuality.