Writing the Passions

Writing the Passions is a book of literary criticism, of philosophy and of the politics of modernity. It explores the arguments on the location of feeling in literature, on the fragmentation of the self under the pressures of the passions, of the place of the passions in psychoanalytic practice and theory, and on the notions of multiplicity, soul, spirit, polytheism and animism developed from their bases in psychoanalytic and Derridean theory. The relations between writing and the passions are addressed through individual texts, ranging across many centuries and from Europe to China. Writers and texts discussed include Plato, Andrew Marvell, Swinburne, Salman Rushdie, Iain Banks, Guattari and many others. Topics addressed include the meaning of crime passionnel, art and the wound, passion and ceremonial, adoration and abjection, dread and disgust, the nature of the exotic, shame and irony, separation and incompletion and the cure.

David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol.