C. G. Jung and literary theory: the challenge from fiction

C.G. Jung and Literary Theory remedies a significant omission in literary studies by doing for Jung and poststructuralist literary theories what has been done extensively for Freud, Lacan and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This work represents a complete departure from traditional Jungian literary criticism. Instead, radically new Jungian literary theories are developed of deconstruction, feminist theory, gender and psyche, the body and sexuality, spirituality, postcolonialism, historicism and reader-response. As well as linking Jung to the work of Derrida, Kristeva and Irigaray, the book traces contentious occult, cultural and political narratives in Jung's career. It contains a chapter on Jung and fascism in a literary context. [From the Publisher]

Postcolonial futures: postcolonial literature and the Obama moment

Since the late 1970s the western academy has encouraged the development of postcolonial literary theory and the formulation of a postcolonial literary canon existing outside the prescriptive narratives of the ‘mother’ country and empire. Having lost faith in the binary oppositions underpinning such narratives, we turned to alternative fictions that contested the construction of the ‘other’, the world divided between the ‘West and the Rest’. The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 marked the beginning of the discipline now known as postcolonial studies with its new ways of understanding ‘the west’s’ relationship with ‘the east’ and, by extension, all the former colonies of empire. Despite these radical origins, however, postcolonialism’s more recent emphasis on the psychological and its affirmation of the hybrid text and self has, for many, served to obscure real economic social realities that have very little to do with the magical or wondrous textual expression of a postcolonial identity. This paper considers problems associated with defining the postcolonial and proposes that, in a literary context, we broaden its meaning to include texts traditionally outside the category of postcolonial literature. To extend the meaning of postcolonial is timely as we are now witnessing its relocation from ‘margin’ to ‘centre’ with the election of Barack Obama. This moment may be seen as a disruption of conventional understandings of what constitutes postcolonial literature, essentially as oppositional discourse that could only define itself as peripheral to, or ‘post’, metropolitan and economic concerns. [From the Author]