Chapter 9 is a concluding chapter which considers the relationship between the relevance-theoretic approach taken in this book and other theories of literature. It covers approaches interested in the linguistic form of literary texts, in particular Russian formalism, practical criticism, new criticism and stylistics, arguing that they are largely based on a code model of language which does not capture the contextual variability of the literary reading process. The chapter also compares relevance theory with reader-response theory and addresses questions around authorial intention and indeterminacy of meaning, with reference to Barthes’ notion of ‘the death of the author’. A distinction is made between spontaneous readings of the kind this book has described and explained, and those ‘readings’ in which an obscured ideological basis is uncovered in a text, for example, in the work of Edward Said. This is presented as a difference between what is ostensively communicated and what can be unintentionally revealed by a text. Psychoanalytic and post-structuralist approaches are also discussed in this chapter, drawing the conclusion that they both differ radically from relevance theory in their aims and processes. Finally the chapter indicates some of the current directions in relevance-theoretic work on literature.

‘Anne Enright, Trauma and Fiction’ provides an overview and psychologically inflected analysis of the novels of Anne Enright, focusing on two key ideas: motherhood and the workings of the unconscious. It is argued that Enright’s work, beginning with The Wig My Father Wore (1995) and continuing on to The Wren, The Wren (2023), constitutes something new in the feminine exploration of the psyche in Irish fiction. Central to this analysis is a cross-referencing of Enright’s novels to her non-fiction, particularly her book about motherhood, Making Babies (2004). These concerns, and the related interest in mother–daughter relationships, are traced through What Are You Like? (2000), The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), the Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering (2007), The Forgotten Waltz (2011), The Green Road (2015), and Actress (2020). The chapter concludes by putting Enright’s work in the context of other recent Irish fiction by women that explores the nature of the psyche.

‘Irish Gothic’ identifies a consensus in the critical literature in relation to the term, which has largely been applied to a set of male authors – Charles Robert Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker – whose novels have been read in psychoanalytic terms as allegories for the anxieties of a failing Anglo-Irish elite in the nineteenth century. However, this term largely overlooks the pervasive incidence of a Gothic mode in earlier novels from the late eighteenth century, such as those of Sydney Owenson and Regina Maria Roche. The advent of the digital archive makes readily available previously overlooked texts, such as the anonymous Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760), which allow us to significantly extend if also complicate the history of the Irish Gothic, while James McHenry’s The Wilderness (1823) is an Irish Gothic novel largely set in Pennsylvania, reminding us of the extended transnational dimension of the Irish Gothic.

‘Sexuality and the Irish Novel’ situates the work of Irish writers addressing sexuality in Irish fiction after about 1960 in the context of the final years of literary censorship in the Irish Republic. Around the time of Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy (1960–4), a series of novels, including J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955), Anthony Cronin’s The Life of Riley (1964), and later John McGahern’s The Pornographer (1979), combine explorations of sexuality with experiments in literary form. In the case of Anthony C. West’s The Ferret Fancier (1963) and Julia O’Faolain’s Women in the Wall (1975), the exploration of sexuality involves combining the historical novel with the Bildungsroman, while Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle (1977) strives for an embodied feminine consciousness. In each case, these novels explore sexual repression as a symptom not only of a postcolonial condition but also of the alienating tendencies of capitalist modernity.

Chapter 3 examines an absurd, tic-tac-toe-faced avatar created by Art Spiegelman, known as “OXO.” I argue that Spiegelman’s adoption of the “OXO” persona functions as a coded emblem of his process of coming to terms with traumatic loss. The figure of “OXO” and his tic-tac-toe-faced family first appeared in 1983, contemporaneously with Spiegelman’s work on Maus.  Conjugating comics with tic-tac-toe yields a new understanding of the comics grid itself as an alternating game of reading and looking: a game that undisciplines the grid and makes it playful. Moreover, perceived as a face, tic-tac-toe embodies the complexities of inherited identity, or an identity dictated by the play of external forces. OXO’s symbolic richness helps Spiegelman revisit his 1972 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History,” the first comic he produced on his long road to Maus. This chapter presents an extended case study of a one-page “OXO” comic, “Lost,” in which the cartoonist reenters and reimagines both recent and distant memories of loss, in an ongoing and necessarily incomplete effort to master them.

This book places the larger autobiographical projects of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other for the first time, drawing on a range of previously unanalyzed works. It argues that the structurally layered, word-and-image form of comics is particularly well-suited to negotiate complex filial inheritances and manage identity in the face of transgenerational trauma. Each chapter is organized around a different formal trope that highlights an aspect of the visual language of comics and its material processes: boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs. From Jewishness to gender, from high modernism to lesbian feminist communities, Filial Linesshows how the comics form is capacious enough to accommodate the push–pull of inheritance and invention, enabling both creators to negotiate their place in (or beyond) various lines of familial, cultural, and artistic descent. Integrating formalist and psychoanalytic frameworks, and parsing alignments and differences with different forms of practice, the book situates today’s graphic memoir canon as an unexpected outpost – and expansion – of avant-garde formalism long after the modernist moment of form.

Chapter 1 traces the appearance of psychopath in nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse and his precipitate adoption by mid-century crime fiction. This fiction registered the uncertainties within the American psychiatric community about whether hereditarian or developmental theoretical models best explained him. With the gradual ascendance of the latter, particularly in the form of psychoanalysis, the everyday origins of deviant behavior came under examination, and the line between the normal and the pathological received greater scrutiny. Through extended readings of two mid-century detective novels, Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1948) and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952), as well as shorter discussions of other works, the chapter identifies a shift in the narrative focus and epistemological structure of the genre of crime fiction. Where the mystery of the classical crime narrative had been the crime event and its solution had been providing the proper name of the perpetrator, with the arrival of the psychopath, the mystery increasingly became the riddle of the criminal himself, and the solution entailed explaining his desire, motivations, and behavior. It was, in effect, a transition from whodunit to whatisit. And this transition expanded the guilty parties to include not only the detective but female victims as well.

The popularization of psychoanalysis following World War II provided African American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry with a new paradigm for exploring the effects of racial prejudice and discrimination on Black identity and consciousness. The new field of social psychiatry helped these writers expand their frame to encompass the broader environment of American racism and examine how segregation was not just about the control of Black bodies but about the psychological control of Black minds. Their nonfiction writings and experimentation with the documentary mode of the photo-essay illuminate how visual culture could be adapted to reveal Black lives under the pressure of racial discrimination and increasing cold war surveillance. All four fought to find and improvise safe spaces, both physical and psychological, for African Americans during a decade in which the national security state overshadowed and conflicted with civil rights goals.

Chapter 4 continues the discussion of why same-sex marriage happened in Cuba, proposing additional contributing factors related to Cuba’s post-Soviet economy, including foreign investment and tourism. In particular, it argues that same-sex marriage is not merely a sign of decreasing homophobia, but of a transformation in sexual identity categories.

Over the years, and at the margin of psychology, there have been interesting and original lines of reflections on ageing based on careful observations of older people’s lives in their environment. First, the environment came to the fore in approaches developed in dialogue with geography, which started to apprehend it as a landscape of care. Second, ethnographies of ageing gave in-depth understanding of development in age in more or less supportive, more or less formal environments. Third, psychoanalysis developed its reflection on ageing as it saw its steady change. It has theorised the specificities of the ageing psyche, while showing its multiple determinations. Put together, these three lines of studies pave the way for a rich, case-study based approach to development in older age, where people are understood as deeply related to the evolving environments in which they live.

Leveraging the late José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, this contribution proposes Brownness as a structuring concept for the study of racial affect in the Roman Mediterranean. Scholarship on race in the Roman Mediterranean has privileged somatic and/or phenotypic paradigms; approaches to race and racial formation that do not accord primacy to the inscription of race on the body are generally rare in the secondary literature, which has not systematically engaged with explorations of racialisation and affect in Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Queer studies. Moving in step with recent efforts to bring critical race theory to bear on the figuration of Blackness in ancient Greek texts, this chapter maps several interpretative strategies for tracking and evaluating Brownness in Roman texts – as a matrix of shame, anxiety, and melancholic subjection.

This chapter considers modernity from the perspective of the self-fashioning subject, stressing both the centrality of Jews to European modernity and their precarity. It pairs two contexts of change: the central-European crucible of Jewish modernity from the 1880s to 1920s; and the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian-related thought. Torn between assimilation and collective identification against discrimination and antisemitism, many exchanged rural Judaism for emancipated intellectuality and leftwing political action. By the 1920s, a transnationally scaled antagonism pitted cosmopolitanism and this mobile intellectual culture of the highly educated against exclusivist ideas of national belonging. Freud’s life and career exemplified those histories. As a “scientific” approach to the study of mind, consciousness, and emotions, Freudianism reached far beyond the professional therapeutics of psychoanalysis itself. It joined far wider thinking about personhood and the unconscious, including other psychologies, spiritualism, esoteric knowledge, and the occult. It appealed to anyone seeking enlightenment by means of a self-consciously crafted modern self.

This essay accounts for the pervasive presence of technology in Elizabeth Bowen’s life and writing, arguing that her work develops a nuanced, often ambivalent engagement with technological modernity. From her first novel, The Hotel, to the late and idiosyncratic Eva Trout, Bowen presents technology not merely as a backdrop but as a dynamic force shaping identity, social interaction, and temporal awareness. The chapter traces how Bowen’s characters interact with technological objects – including cars, telephones, radios, and computers – not only as tools but as extensions of the self and mediators of experience. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects, it demonstrates how Bowen’s characters use technology to navigate psychological development and social belonging. This culminates in a reading of Eva Trout, in which technology becomes a totalising force, anticipating postmodern concerns with cyborg identity and media saturation, and positioning Bowen as a prescient analyst of the evolving relationship between humans and machines.

Medical autobiographies begin as pseudonymous case histories for medical doctors’ consideration of supposedly pathological conditions, and become accounts of the ways mid-twentieth-century physicians’ psychiatric practices harmed and inhibited, and did not treat or assist, gay, memoir-writing patients. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts then recount their lives and therapeutic practices as living examples, which run contrary to conventional, prevailing professional opinions on homosexuality, and eventually negotiate their professions’ important, redefining turning points of 1969, 1973, and 1992. As a later generation narrates stories of addiction, disease, and physical abuse at family members’ hands, they can commence with the confident assumption of the health of a gay male body.  They can, unlike their predecessors, see homosexuality as the least of their worries. Initially a sign of a psyche gone awry, same-sex sexuality, over the course of five generations, becomes the healthy norm, from which the most recent gay American autobiographers draw their strengths, instead of seeking supposed cures.

Abstract: In this chapter, Colapietro discusses Dewey’s critique of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in Human Nature and Conduct (1922). Rejecting Freud’s instinct theory, Dewey argues that impulses are flexible and shaped by experience rather than fixed drives. Yet, as Colapietro shows, Dewey’s account of impulse transformation – through discharge, suppression, or sublimation – parallels Freud’s concept of drive vicissitudes, despite avoiding Freud’s focus on repression and the unconscious. Dewey refutes the idea that fear, aggression, and love are innate instincts, instead viewing impulses as evolving within complex social contexts. His anti-elementalist stance rejects reductionist psychology, replacing it with a dynamic account of personality formation influenced by culture and environment. The chapter illustrates how Dewey’s theory of impulse modification offers a socially embedded alternative to instinct theory. Colapietro underscores that, for Dewey, moral and intellectual growth depends not on suppressing impulses but rather on intelligently redirecting them within dynamic social environments.

Psychoanalysis deals with individual and collective trauma, in relation to the unconscious reproduction of what has caused a psychic breakthrough for the subject and the group, with each aftermath re-semantising painful past experiences. Archaic fears and defence mechanisms are common to everyone before giving way to more evolved modes of functioning. Confrontation with major traumatic experiences can undo the symbolic capacities acquired during human development and plunge the subject and the group into archaic modes of functioning: projection of the bad object outside the group, splitting between an all-good self-image and an all-bad image of the other, and denial of the suffering of the outside group. This regressive logic traps the actors in a victimisation likely to lead to further violence or to maintain a climate of permanent threat. Working on the dual recognition of trauma means that the experiences are not hidden, that the point of view of the other (whether inside or outside the group) is integrated and that a narrative of the past that leaves room for internal and external polyphony is passed on to future generations. This leads to the expression of internal conflict within oneself and one’s community, rejecting a monolithic vision of identity and history.