Closer and Closer Apart

Envy, Rosemary Lloyd says, involves what one would like to have but does not; jealousy, what one has but fears losing. Lloyd demonstrates in Closer and Closer Apart how the passion unleashed by jealousy can illuminate such concepts as self and other, gender and society. Jealousy, in her view, exerts a powerful attraction in literature, partly because it distorts the individual's perceptions of the other in highly productive ways, and partly because it serves as paradigms for reading and for stor