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Obsession and culture : a study of sexual obsession in modern fiction
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Obsession and culture : a study of sexual obsession in modern fiction

Author: Andrew Brink
Publisher: Madison [N.J.] : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; London : Associated University Presses, ©1996.
Edition/Format:   Book : EnglishView all editions and formats
Summary:
Obsession and Culture proposes that male sexual obsessions are the driving force of culture and are most clearly seen in fiction. Examples could be multiplied many times, but the main objectives of this study are to show how the work of five male authors coheres within a framework of psychodynamic theory and to stimulate enquiry along these lines. Many twentieth-century novelists speak for a male psycho-class needing  Read more...
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Additional Physical Format: Online version:
Brink, Andrew.
Obsession and culture.
Madison [N.J.] : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; London : Associated University Presses, c1996
(OCoLC)603724265
Named Person: Hermann Hesse; Hermann Hesse; John Fowles; Hermann Hesse; Vladimir V Nabokov; John Updike; Herbert G Wells
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Andrew Brink
ISBN: 0838635962 9780838635964
OCLC Number: 32737923
Description: 254 p. ; 25 cm.
Contents: Introduction: The obsessive imagination in writers --
H. G. Wells: The confessions of a sexual rebel --
Herman Hesse and bisexuality --
Love and death in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita : a fantasy analysis of an obsession --
Female sacrifice in the novels of John Fowles --
Eros and death in John Updike's fiction --
Obsession: The driving force of culture.
Responsibility: Andrew Brink.

Abstract:

Obsession and Culture proposes that male sexual obsessions are the driving force of culture and are most clearly seen in fiction. Examples could be multiplied many times, but the main objectives of this study are to show how the work of five male authors coheres within a framework of psychodynamic theory and to stimulate enquiry along these lines. Many twentieth-century novelists speak for a male psycho-class needing imaginative externalization of obsessive sexual fantasies of control of women. Attraction, avoidance, and guilt are powerful motivators for writers and readers alike, and the moral ambiguity of serial monogamy, as well as other forms of exploitative sexuality, prompt certain writers to construct symbolic expiation and repair in fiction. Psychobiography is combined with fantasy analysis to suggest the pervasiveness in modern fiction of the wish to conquer and to control women and to atone for the guilt.

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