Out from Under the Artist’s Brush: A Lacanian Approach to Painting and Naturalism

This book creates new perspectives on the integral relationship of painting, writing and psychoanalysis in the disclosure of Naturalism. It offers historical and psychoanalytical perspectives on the debate over whether the Goncourt brothers or Zola founded Naturalism. The interplay between the personal and authorical identity offers a fertile return to the heart of Lacanian texts. Focusing on complex relations of gender, desire and eroticized representations of the male and female body, it argues for new theories of culture through a structured textual analysis of the French naturalist novels. By comparing a wide range of fields, it addresses the new and exciting work now being produced in the field of psychoanalysis and its relation to sexual difference, feminism, subjectivity and culture.