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The following Turning Point offers responses, from four leading critics, to Isobel Armstrong’s Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth Century Fiction. At a time when the meaning and ...

he introduction presents the objectives behind collecting a series of papers on 'languages of emotion' and outline how this language might be articulated. The editors of this special issue ask if it is possible to 'think' the emotions and discuss the apparent tension between experiencing emotion (a non-linguistic event) and reflecting on emotion (a process which forces the individual to imagine it by means of equivalents). The displacement of emotion is explored in relation to both the volume's contents and also contemporary theorists on emotion from the neurologist Edmund Rolls to commentators such as Teresa Brennan and James Elkins. The authors finally consider how intellectual, academically accountable approaches to the subject of feeling might both account for and remain sensitive to immediate experiential responses.

Armstrong questions the discrete separation of dream and waking life, originating with Freud, in current psychoanalytical thinking, and asks, accordingly, 'what is a dream?' Alternative accounts of the relation between dream and waking states can be derived from Ella Freeman Sharpe's poetics of the dream, understood through the workings of metaphor, and through Wilfred Bion's reversal of Freud's categories, as he explored what it would mean to dream during the day. Insights into the nature of dreaming in Romantic poetry, particularly that of Shelley and Wordsworth, illuminate psychoanalytic discourses of dreams.

(1998). Writing from the Broken Middle: The post‐aesthetic. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 62-96.

(1995). Textual harassment: The ideology of close reading, or how close is close? Textual Practice: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 401-420.

(1993). So what's all this about the mother's body?: The aesthetic, gender and the polis. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 172-187.