Literature

This book traces a long-standing concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognizable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterized Grass's relationship to this sphere and his identity as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.

This book focuses on travelogues by Iranians traveling to Europe in the nineteenth century. It argues for an interpretive framework that moves away from an overemphasis on the destinations of travel (particularly in cases where the destination, such as Europe, signifies larger meanings such as modernity) and that historicizes the travelogue itself as a rhetorical text in the service of its origin’s concerns and developments. Within this framework, this book demonstrates the ways in which travel writings from Iran to Europe were used to position Qajar Iran (1794–1925) within a global context—that is, narration of travel to Europe was also narrating the power of the Qajar court even when political events were tipped against it—and relatedly, how both travel to Europe and also translations of travel narratives into Persian should be included in our understanding of the importance of geography and mapping to the Qajars, especially during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this process, it also reexamines the notion that Iranian modernity was the chief outcome of Iranians traveling in and writing about Europe.

This book investigates the lives and writings of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The renowned sculptor (and mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self‐proclaimed mystic and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first‐hand accounts of their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint. By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book is a text‐based analysis, which argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. It suggests that partially delusional narratives such as these may be read as metaphorical representations of real suffering. The construction of these narratives constituted an act of resistance by the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century. Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a fascinating but hitherto unrecognized literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.