Internal Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Literature

This book analyzes the identity crisis found in nineteenth-century post-Romantic literature. By mirroring several Antihumanist theories through the Jungian theory of the shadow, the author argues that this literature anticipates our contemporary “internal conflict.”

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Internal Conflict in Nineteenth-century Literature: Reading the Jungian Shadow” examines the genealogy of the Jungian shadow in Romantic and post-Romantic literature. Ştefan Bolea analyzes the way the crisis of identity in nineteenth-century literature prefigures our contemporary “inner discord” by means of the philosophy of literature, combining literary criticism with psychoanalytical phenomenology. This book provides a deep analysis of the connection between this “inner discord” and the century that brought us industrialization, nationalism, modernity, and the unconscious by comparing Jung’s theory of the shadow with Nietzche’s and Cioran’s versions of Antihumanism in a highly interdisciplinary landscape. Scholars of psychology, philosophy, literature, media studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.