Visions in Exile

Malcolm K. Read employs a psychoanalytic model which sees civilization as a manner of instinctual renunciation in this analysis of selected texts from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on their moments of silence and contradiction, he demonstrates that certain attitudes toward the body expressed in these texts have a basis, albeit unconscious, in a motivation which is ultimately political. The central topics, deeply intertwined thematically and theoretically, relate