Translations of Power : : Narcissim and the Unconscious in Epic History / / Elizabeth J. Bellamy.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Bellamy, Elizabeth J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1992
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)

Elizabeth J. Bellamy here casts new theoretical light on the Renaissance genre of the dynastic epic. Drawing upon Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to illuminate the emergence of an epic "subjecthood," she focuses on Virgil's Aeneid, Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Spenser's Faerie Queene in an attempt to demonstrate how the operations of the unconscious may be interpreted within narrative history.Bellamy first evaluates the psychoanalytic approach to epic as a possible alternative to the new historicism. Turning to the Aeneid, she discusses Freud's'neurotic'relation to Rome as a founding image for a historical unconscious. She then interweaves a genealogy of epic subjecthood with the motif of the translatio imperii, likening the'translations of power'that constitute the translatio imperii to extended meditations on the fate of Troy throughout literary history. According to Bellamy, the epic genre manifests a repeated displacement and repression of its Trojan origins, and the doomed city of Troy represents the locus of epic's own narrative narcissism. Offering provocative analyses of epic temporality and of the function of the death drive in epic narrative, she concludes that dynastic epic may be seen as a structure of narcissistic desire which undermines the capacity of the epic to embody a fully articulated historical subject.Translations of Power will enliven current debates among scholars and students of Renaissance culture, literary theory, gender studies, and psychoanalytic criticism.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- CHAPTER ONE. Psychoanalyzing Epic History -- CHAPTER TWO. A Disturbance of Memory in Carthage -- CHAPTER THREE. Habendi Libido: Ariosto's Armor of Narcissism -- CHAPTER FOUR. Troia Vittrice: Reviving Troy in the Woods of Jerusalem -- CHAPTER FIVE. The Alienating Structure of Prophecy in "Faerie Lond" -- CHAPTER SIX. Obsessional Time: Waiting for Death in Epic -- Frequently Cited Secondary Sources -- Index