Family Romance

This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a daring, multidisciplinary investigation of the imaginative foundations of modern politics. Hunt uses the term `Family Romance', (coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and belonging to one of higher social standing), in a broader sense, to describe the images of the familial order that structured the collective political unconscious. In a wide-ranging account that uses novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that the politics of the French Revolution were experienced through the network of the family romance.

Édouard Manet's paintings have long been recognized for being visually compelling and uniquely recalcitrant. While critics have noted the presence of family members and intimates in paintings such as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Nancy Locke takes an unprecedented look at the significance of the artist's family relationships for his art. Locke argues that a kind of mythology of the family, or Freudian family romance, frequently structures Manet's compositional decisions and choice of models. By looking at the representation of the family as a volatile mechanism for the development of sexuality and of repression, conflict, and desire, Locke brings powerful new interpretations to some of Manet's most complex works. Locke considers, for example, the impact of a father-son drama rooted in a closely guarded family secret: the adultery of Manet père and the status of Léon Leenhoff. Her nuanced exploration of the implications of this story--that Manet in fact married his father's mistress--makes us look afresh at even well-known paintings such as Olympia. This book sheds new light on Manet's infamous interest in gypsies, street musicians, and itinerants as Locke analyzes the activities of Manet's father as a civil judge. She also reexamines the close friendship between Manet and the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who married Manet's brother. Morisot becomes the subject of a series of meditations on the elusiveness of the self, the transience of identity, and conflicting concerns with appearances and respectability. Manet and the Family Romance offers an entirely new set of arguments about the cultural forces that shaped these alluring paintings.

The author of The Debt to Pleasure digs into his family's extraordinary past in a memoir as enthralling as his finest fiction It was only when his mother died that John Lanchester realized how little he really knew about his parents. With the cache of letters and papers she left behind, he set out to reconstruct just who his parents had been. In doing so, he did much more than trace the remarkable story of a reluctant international banker, a secretive former nun, and the life they shared; he also gained extraordinary insight into his own nature and a deeper understanding of the universal push-pull of family love-and family loss. Part detective work, part evocation of character, this is, above all, compelling storytelling.

‘Marco Roth’s book about his father is a farewell to a bygone culture – polygot, intellectual, Europhile, psychoanalytic – and simultaneously a renewal of that culture. It’s moving, tough-minded, and distinctive, a memoir the likes of which nobody else could write.’ Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician – from the time he could get his toddler tongue to pronounce a word like ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’ or recite a French poem – Marco Roth was able to share his parents’ New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father began to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s. What this family would not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it’s a story of how preciousness can slow us down when it comes to understanding our desires and other people’s. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams and J. R. Ackerley, The Scientists grapples with a troubled and emotional inheritance, in a style that is both elegiac and defiant.

Uses 19th and 20th-century Irish Gothic literary texts to argue that capitalism, the nuclear patriarchal family and Protestantism coincided with and reinforced the conditions for the plantation of Ireland and the colonization which followed.

"Drawing on Habermas and Freud as well as historians of the family, Daniels takes up the case of three women novelists each writing at a key moment in the parallel development of the novel genre and the modern family. She demonstrates that these writers - confronted with ever more reified exclusion from public life, and relegated to narrowly defined domestic roles - intervened in and subverted the process in their novels. Daniels shows that women writers used the novel first to imagine different social rules that might define alternative kinship systems (Graffigny), and later to find - and create - loopholes within a firmly entrenched system of official and unofficial law (Charriere and Sand)." "Spanning a crucial period in the emergence of modernity, this interdisciplinary study addresses problems in French literary and social history, gender studies, and the history of mentalites."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A "beautiful and terrifying" novel about family, faith, and the search for home (San Francisco Chronicle), set amidst a community of UFO cultists in middlest America. As regular guests on late-night radio shows, Dash and Dot are the world's most in-demand lecturers on the topic of UFOs and alien abduction. They believe that we are all descended from M31, the nearest galaxy to ours, and divide their time between life on the road and a decommissioned church in the Midwest. A radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in its sanctuary complete the modern nuclear-family setting. When a couple of UFO groupies arrive at the church with their own agenda, everything changes, brought to a head by their strange beliefs and the timeless difficulties of modern life. Dash and Dot set out on their last trip, their ultimate journey, with a destination that no one could foretell. Written with a fevered vividness and immediacy, M31: A Family Romance has been hailed as "a devastatingly forceful accomplishment" from "a star of the first magnitude" (the Washington Post).

The penultimate chapter portrays the decline of Emma's uncle, the famous aesthete Stephen Tennant, who was written about by V.S. Naipaul in The Enigma of the Arrival. Deeply evocative and atmospheric, and written with stunning detail, Strangers is, as The Guardian explains: "a historical chronicle but also a reverie on where you put your family inside yourself."