Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors
<p>Freud's theories of the uncanny are generally treated ahistorically as an originary text. This essay places his work in the context of nineteenth-century English theories of childhood development (particularly the work of James Sully), the uncanny, and the unconscious. Drawing on liter...
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| Format: | Journal article |
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Indiana University Press
2015
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| _version_ | 1826296080097083392 |
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| author | Shuttleworth, S |
| author_facet | Shuttleworth, S |
| author_sort | Shuttleworth, S |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>Freud's theories of the uncanny are generally treated ahistorically as an originary text. This essay places his work in the context of nineteenth-century English theories of childhood development (particularly the work of James Sully), the uncanny, and the unconscious. Drawing on literary texts from Robert Southey, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Power Cobbe, and the art of John William Waterhouse, it explores how the ancient oracular figure of the teraph, interpreted, rather macabrely, as the severed head of a child, became an embodiment of both the workings of the unconscious mind and the uncanny in nineteenth-century culture, and the locus of cultural and social anxieties projected onto the figure of the child.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T04:10:50Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:c7c31af0-810c-406a-baa0-3efd050556bc |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T04:10:50Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | Indiana University Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:c7c31af0-810c-406a-baa0-3efd050556bc2022-03-27T06:47:31ZChildhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursorsJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:c7c31af0-810c-406a-baa0-3efd050556bcSymplectic Elements at OxfordIndiana University Press2015Shuttleworth, S<p>Freud's theories of the uncanny are generally treated ahistorically as an originary text. This essay places his work in the context of nineteenth-century English theories of childhood development (particularly the work of James Sully), the uncanny, and the unconscious. Drawing on literary texts from Robert Southey, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Power Cobbe, and the art of John William Waterhouse, it explores how the ancient oracular figure of the teraph, interpreted, rather macabrely, as the severed head of a child, became an embodiment of both the workings of the unconscious mind and the uncanny in nineteenth-century culture, and the locus of cultural and social anxieties projected onto the figure of the child.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Shuttleworth, S Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors |
| title | Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors |
| title_full | Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors |
| title_fullStr | Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors |
| title_full_unstemmed | Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors |
| title_short | Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors |
| title_sort | childhood severed heads and the uncanny freudian precursors |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT shuttleworths childhoodseveredheadsandtheuncannyfreudianprecursors |