Sydneyreviewofbooks

Reviewing Jacques Lacan's early writings, Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder pull back the curtain on French psychiatry in the early twentieth century - a medical milieu that would prove pivotal for Lacan's understanding of psychosis.

In time for Oscar Wilde's birthday, Bruce Gardiner unfurls the aesthetic philosophy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Examining the relation between beauty and time, sex and art, Gardiner shows how Wilde himself may have misread his best-known work.

Joshua Barnes on a melancholic history of the chapter

International literary prizes and book reviews are increasingly acknowledging the importance of translated work. However, as Jennifer Lindsay argues, while translators themselves are receiving acclaim, their art remains largely underappreciated.

Reviewing books by two of the world's leading psychoanalytic writers, Christian R. Gelder explores the challenge that psychoanalysis poses not only to conventional understandings of self and sex, but also to the prevailing therapeutic culture.

Why was Elizabeth von Arnim so quickly and thoroughly forgotten? I wonder if the answer instead lies in the honesty with which she writes about women, the double standards to which they are habitually subjected, and the men whose unthinking or ap

The point being there is something incongruous about a biography that looks for answers in the past of a person who, herself, believed she was always in a state of becoming.

Despite the title, The Age of the Poets is not a dedicated treatise on poetry or its history, but a collection of occasional essays on various aspects of the literary process from Badiou's philosophical point of view.

Biographies juxtapose competing views of particular events, moments and aspects of Plath's life. Red Comet, over a thousand pages, takes in all the other Plath biographies before it. Scholarship is meant to work like this, as is legal precedent.

What we missed told us something about what we are: not the calculating units of neoliberal legend, but social beings first and foremost, whose sociality - whose embodied sociality - is the precondition of our individuality. We missed each other,