This thesis offers a close reading from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis of a selection of literary texts published in Britain in the thirty years leading to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. These works, belonging to different genres – science fiction, gothic and the adventure or quest – are loosely categorized as ‘fantasy’ literature as opposed to the realistic novel or short story. My contention is that it is only in conjunction with a consideration of Jacques Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’, that is, his re-examination of the texts of Sigmund Freud, and the work of contemporary theorists writing in Lacan’s wake, such as Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, that the significance of the fanciful plots and devices appearing in the texts emerges. My starting point is the resemblance which the plot of each of these works bears to that of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, published in 1913, which tells of the killing of a primal father. What might be labelled as the return of the primal father, a violent and obscene figure who must be killed again (whereas for Freud this was a unique event which occurred at the beginning of human time), appears in a period when ‘modern’ Britain is coming into a being, that is, an industrialized, urbanized, literate democracy. It can be seen that the re-appearance of this evil primal father figure follows the demise of traditional forms of authority of the agrarian society, that of the ‘everyday’ father, the aristocracy and the church, and concurrently, the increasing dominance of scientific discourse and technology. In this and in further ways which will be discussed in the thesis, the texts bring to light the function of apparently obsolete symbolic frameworks and the corresponding deficiency in modern paradigms of knowledge, in particular, the blind spots of science. This reading thereby diverges sharply from those typical of existing literary criticism in that as opposed to being read in terms of and pertaining to the reconstructed context of a past era, the texts are seen as unfolding common concerns in regard to the modernisation of Britain, thus rendering them still relevant today.

If the possible ends of art criticism are taken to include not only the provision of a detailed evaluation of the artwork, but, cognately, an elaboration upon how one has been, or believes oneself to have been, changed by a particular artistic encounter, then the very praxis of art criticism stands to benefit from a theoretical elucidation of the possible nature of the subjective transformations that may flow from the critical appreciation of art. We are entitled to enquire, in particular, into the conditions under which, and indeed the extent to which, such putative change at the personal level can be explicated in moral epistemological terms. It is pertinent in this context also to investigate the phenomenal character of the experiences that have been operative and their essential structures; to enquire, in short, into the phenomenology of the transformative artistic encounter. In this thesis, the bearing, in particular, of intersubjectivity upon the content and modalities of disclosure in a literary context will be investigated. It will be shown how an understanding of the relevance of intersubjectivity to the phenomenology of literary experience can inform an assessment of the claims of literary aesthetic moral cognitivism. Yet the intention to clarify the connection between literary experience and intersubjectivity also requires reflection upon what it is in the first place to encounter someone else, and to apperceive a foreign subjectivity and its motivations. For this reason, the contributions of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein to the investigation of the phenomenology of empathy will be discussed and evaluated. This discussion will in turn be shown to be of assistance in clarifying the role of the imagination in the apperception and comprehension of another person’s mental life. The thought of Jean Starobinski will prove to elucidate the question of why the insights of the phenomenological tradition are highly pertinent to the investigation of literary experience, and to the development, in particular, of a conception of an imagined ‘Other’ who is (in a sense that will be clarified) embedded within the literary text, a person, that is, to whom one might coherently refer as the “implied author”. For reasons which will emerge in the course of this study, it will be argued that authentic empathy, in its fulfilling explication (in the Steinian sense), is given to the empathising consciousness in the manner of a semblance, and, consonantly, that the phenomenological structure of authentic empathy is characterised in its mature phases by an homological relation to pictureconsciousness. The epistemological significance of literature’s capacities for moral suggestion will be explicated principally in terms of the unfolding of values within the human personality, and in terms of the disclosure of the phenomenal character and structures of virtuous experience. It will be explained why the structure of empathy has implications for the aesthetic value of literature. The question of the relation between aesthetic and ethical value will be clarified. In this context, it will be argued on phenomenological grounds that the appresentation of moral virtue in an implied author could contribute to the aesthetic value of a literary work, although it will also be shown that implied authorial moral virtue could conflict irremediably with other qualities like moral doubt and uncertainty, which may themselves be important sources of aesthetic value. For this reason, the thesis will conclude by challenging the ethicist view that an aesthetically relevant ethical flaw in a literary work must count as an aesthetic flaw.

'The Saturday Night Ghost Club', a work involving selective memory loss resulting from a traumatic event, depicts the mechanics of this loss, conveying the manner in which a primary character’s condition — one distinguished by his inability to remember a key trauma — combines with active strategies to avoid recall of said trauma. In preparing to write this thesis, and in toggling between the critical and creative elements, I found myself drawn back to a theme of long obsession: the idea of memory loss and memory retrieval, and the bedrock scientific and psychological principles that inform the subject. I was interested in the plausibility of the condition affecting Calvin Sharpe, and curious about the science and psychology of memory repression following trauma; this led to an interest in the manner in which it has been represented in fiction — specifically, the fiction of my home country. As the creative thesis took shape, I began to (a) re-read works in which memory plays a role, paying attention to books featuring depictions of medical conditions which effect memory — for example, “buried” or “repressed” memories — play a role, and (b) investigate scientific sources and general readership books focused on behavioural sciences, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.