Refinding the Object in Modern Fiction Studies

Abstract

Object relations theory reaches back to Sigmund Freud's 1905 essay "The Finding of an Object" and fully exfoliates in the groundbreaking child analysis of Melanie Klein, the developmental psychology of D. W. Winnicott, Hanna Segal's psychoanalytic aesthetics, and recent advances in queer theory, postcolonial studies, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Increasingly, theorists and clinicians have brought the differing and, at times, contentious methodologies of Klein, Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan into productive psychoanalytic dialogue. "Refinding the Object in Modern Fiction Studies" advances this emerging critical conversation by providing fresh avenues for discerning the object's mediation of desire at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the creative fiction of such canonical modernists as Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and Patrick McGrath.