A few years before his death, Gustave Flaubert finally returned to the adaptation of a legend that had fascinated him since adolescence. The result was The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler, one of his celebrated Three Tales. According to tradition, Julian was a nobleman who turned to a life of self-denial after unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his parents. In Flaubert's hands the legend takes on astonishing complexity and depth. He portrays Julian as a man bound, like Oedipus, by an inexorable fate; a man capable of great cruelty and great piety who both dreads and desires that fate. In Saint/Oedipus, three practitioners of psychocriticism take a close look at Flaubert's powerful and problematic story. Focusing on recurrent patterns of the text, their essays not only shed light on the work itself but constitute an expert introduction to the methods of psychoanalytic criticism. Each contributor approaches The Legend of Saint Julian from a different perspective, drawing on the systems of Freud, Jung, Sartre, and the Chicago school of psychoanalysis. The book includes William Berg's translation of an essay on Saint Julian by Sartre—drawn from his biography of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille—which offers compelling insights into the psychological makeup of Flaubert. Two noteworthy features of the book are a fluent and faithful new translation of Saint Julian by Michel Grimaud, and a comprehensive reader's guide to the literature treating psychoanalytic theory and its application to literary texts.

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In Liberating Oedipus?: Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory, Dr. Filip Kovacevic demonstrates how psychoanalytic theory can join political theory in designing alternative political norms and values. Detailing the thoughts of major psychologists including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou, this book offers a new approach to traditional Lacanian theory. Kovacevic's emphasis on Lacanian psychoanalysis is especially relevant due to the modern challenges of failed globalization and the subsequent terrorist reactions. Kovacevic proves that political practice without an emancipatory psychology to guide it is potentially dangerous. Liberating Oedipus? is a critical text for scholars of political theory and those interested in the history of ideas.

This study of the fictional themes and techniques of Michel Tournier reveals his profound radicalism as a social critic and novelist despite the seeming conventionality of his works. Guided by Tournier's essays and interviews, Petit examines his fiction in light of plot sources, philosophical and anthropological training, and his belief that fiction should change the world. Close study of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, Les Météores, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, and La Goutte d'or, as well as the short fiction in Le Coq de bruyère and Le Médianoche amoureux, shows Tournier's revolutionary conception of plot structuring as he develops key themes, whether religion, sensuality, or prejudice, in more than twenty years spent reconceiving the nature of fiction.

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.