Author : Thomas Albrecht
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438428693
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)
Book Synopsis Medusa Effect, The by : Thomas Albrecht
Download or read book Medusa Effect, The written by Thomas Albrecht and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-12-23 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy. Focusing on the recurring metaphor of Medusas head, The Medusa Effect examines images of horror in texts by Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a series of Victorian artists and critics writing about aesthetics. Through nuanced and innovative readings of canonical works by Freud, Nietzsche, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, A. C. Swinburne, and George Eliot, Thomas Albrecht demonstrates the twofold nature of these writers images of horror. On the one hand, the analysis illuminates how the representation of something seen as horrifyingfor instance, a disturbing work of art, an existential insight, or a recognition of the fundamental inaccessibility of another persons consciousnesscan serve a protective purpose, to defend the writer in some way against the horror he or she encounters. On the other hand, the representations themselves can be a potential threatepistemologically unreliable, for instance, or illusory, deceptive, fundamentally unstable, and potentially dangerous to the writers. Through a psychoanalytically informed literary analysis, The Medusa Effect explores crucial ethical and epistemological questions of Victorian aesthetics, as well as underexamined complexities of the mechanisms of Victorian literary representation. an elegant study in rhetorical analysis. Victorian Studies Thomas Albrecht brings a radically different approach to aestheticspsychoanalytic and poststructuralist rather than historicistin The Medusa Effect. Studies in English Literature