Literature, Modern

The roles of the archaic loving and hating introjects are traced in the early scientific romances and the life work of H.G. Wells. The preambivalent polarization of the early loving introjects of an archaic ego ideal (giving rise to utopian fantasies and, later, to promulgations of a new world state) and the early hostile introjects of an archaic superego (giving rise to fears of death and, later, to fears of cosmic dissolution) is represented in eschatological preoccupations with death, the Last Judgment, heaven and hell.

The expression of sexuality in best-selling novels and major motion pictures was examined. There are two reasons that such stimuli merit systematic analysis. First and foremost is the finding that best-selling novels and major motion pictures exist as a primary source of sexual information. Of equal importance, however, is the need to examine such stimuli for myths and fallacies. The novels and films analyzed in the present study were selected from the last years of three consecutive decades: 1959, 1969, and 1979.

Viktor Frankl has written that people can survive in the most adverse of situations. He emphasized that the will to meaning has actual survival value. Frankl said people who were oriented toward the future or who had loved ones to see again were most likely to have survived the Holocaust. But is this belief valid? Does love have survival value? Six survivors of the Holocaust were interviewed to assess whether they experienced thoughts and feelings as those described by Frankl. Analysis of results from these interviews showed that love was important but so were other factors.

Hans Christian Andersen's story 'The Little Mermaid' is read as a creation myth and a metaphor for woman's condition in patriarchy, broadly conceptualised within a Lacanian framework. In the first part, the psychoanalytic concept of castration (broadly conceptualised as containing any existential severance which forms the basis for sexual difference and subjectivity) is utilised to argue that the myth is about a construction of (mostly female) subjectivity through a series of separations or splits: (1) birth, (2) growing up, (3) desire and (4) death.

This paper is an interpretive analysis of the discourses within popular romance literature, with a particular focus on the genre that includes constructions of the images of nurses and nursing. An historical contrast is made along with examinations of the uses and meanings encompassed within this body of literature, and its messages for women as nurses as it reflects/creates societal change. Deviations from the formulaic nature of these works are explored.

Shakespeare's final play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, contains profound psychological insights. Like all of Shakespeare's reworkings of old material, the result is not merely a variation on a theme but a psychological statement in and of itself, which respects and revisits the past even as it presents a new and original statement.

Emil Aarestrup (1800-56) worked as a general physician, later as a public health officer in Denmark. He married his cousin and wrote love poems to her and to other women. His erotic poetry is regarded as the most elegant in Danish literature. His poems have precise words and colourful details and show a special sense of the condensed mood in the erotic situation. He writes upon the complex nature of love: union, separation and death.

This paper explores the issue of how character is created and re-created in the context of relationships. This theme, salient in the recent film The Hours, has been particularly problematic for creative women, who are often caught in tensions between self-development and relationship. Two case examples are given, in counterpoint to the film and to illustrations from Woolf's life and work. Through these various lenses, we can consider the complex interplays between our conjectures as to the expected price of relationship, and the actual price exacted as our various dramas unfold.

The concept of "illness's social course" can be approached from two stand-points. We can trace both the way the social world shapes the course of an illness and the way an illness' symptoms shape the social world. The purpose of this study is to locate the specific illness of love melancholy in a specific historical and social context, namely that of France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in order to explain the intense discussion on the disorder during that period.

The paper deals with Clarissa's wasting combination of love and religious melancholy, and the way in which ailments of the mind have an immediate effect on the body in this period. George Cheyne's theories of melancholy and hypochondria explain at least some of the mechanisms by which the eighteenth century understood this phenomenon. 'Clarissa' is an important text because it influenced so many later representations of melancholy, especially as it is gendered feminine in Richardson's newly feminised discourse of sensibility.