From the twentieth century in the twenty-first, psychoanalysis and deconstruction have challenged, and continue to challenge, our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. Psychoanalysis revealed that even in our innermost households we are never quite alone; rather, instances of “otherness” incessantly interfere in our most intimate relation to ourselves, forcing us to adapt continuously. Deconstruction, inheriting both this psychoanalytic disclosure and Heidegger’s destruction of the history of metaphysics, went to the foundations of the Western constructions of “the subject” and “the self,” only to find how a destabilizing otherness was always already haunting them. What, if anything, remains of the self in the aftermath? Early on in the wake of deconstruction, a certain misconceived and simplified notion of the “death of the subject” was proclaimed and in recent years more or less successful attempts have been made at reviving the notions of “the subject,” “the self,” and “agency.” In contrast to these attempts at revival, this book offers a two-pronged approach: On the one hand, it argues that neither psychoanalysis nor deconstruction propounds a simple annihilation of the subject or liquidation of the self; on the other hand, however, neither do they pave the way for a “return to the subject” or “resurrection of the self” that would allow us once again to become confident about our presence to ourselves. Instead, this book suggests that if we set ourselves the task of taking up the heritage from psychoanalysis and deconstruction in a serious manner, we are obliged to retrace the subject and the self as undergoing perpetual auto-deconstruction.

From the twentieth century into the twenty-first, psychoanalysis and deconstruction have challenged, and continue to challenge, our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. This book argues that taking forward this heritage we must retrace the subject and the self as undergoing perpetual auto-deconstruction, through the lens of solitude.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is “an intricate and dazzling novel” (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

What if everything you ever wanted isn’t what you actually want? Twenty-something, suit-clad, and upwardly mobile, Joshua Fields Millburn thought he had everything anyone could ever want. Until he didn’t anymore. Blindsided by the loss of his mother and his marriage in the same month, Millburn started questioning every aspect of the life he had built for himself. Then, he accidentally discovered a lifestyle known as minimalism…and everything started to change. That was four years ago. Since, Millburn, now 32, has embraced simplicity. In the pursuit of looking for something more substantial than compulsory consumption and the broken American Dream, he jettisoned most of his material possessions, paid off loads of crippling debt, and walked away from his six-figure career. So, when everything was gone, what was left? Not a how-to book but a why-to book, Everything That Remains is the touching, surprising story of what happened when one young man decided to let go of everything and begin living more deliberately. Heartrending, uplifting, and deeply personal, this engrossing memoir is peppered with insightful (and often hilarious) interruptions by Ryan Nicodemus, Millburn’s best friend of twenty years.

This is the first book to examine how Romantic writers transformed poetic collections to reach new audiences. In a series of case studies, Michael Gamer shows Romantic poets to be fundamentally social authors: working closely with booksellers, intimately involved in literary production, and resolutely concerned with current readers even as they presented themselves as disinterested artists writing for posterity. Exploding the myth of Romantic poets as naive, unworldly, or unconcerned with the practical aspects of literary production, this study shows them instead to be engaged with intellectual property, profit and loss, and the power of reprinting to reshape literary reputation. Gamer offers a fresh perspective on how we think about poetic revision, placing it between aesthetic and economic registers and foregrounding the centrality of poetic collections rather than individual poems to the construction of literary careers.

By examining these competing depictions of combat that coexist in sixteenth-century texts ranging from Arthurian romance to early modern medical texts, this study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.