Externalised Texts of the Self

In the past, literary critics have certainly examined the link between protagonists and external images in works of literature – usually by viewing projections in the Freudian sense as manifestations of displaced desires, however, an encompassing theory of how these external representations of the self are positioned in narrative and what the projectional matrix can reveal about the way subjectivity is presented and activated in works of literature has not yet been developed. This book will attempt to close this blind spot in literary theory by devising a framework with the help of which the manifestations of projected images in literary texts can be adequately portrayed. To this end, four modern novels (Brontë, Lawrence, McEwan, Rhys) that sport a rich tapestry of projectional foils will be analysed in an effort to document the potential of the ‘Externalised Text of the Self’.