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Dreams have a dramatic role to play in Freudian theory, as the dark bearers of an unconscious that is often perceived as intractable and unchanging; the memories and unfulfilled desires of childhood remain fixed forever and re-emerge tentatively at night. Daydreams, on the other hand, offer a lighter view of fantasies in perpetual motion that are short-term by definition, bearing what Freud calls a Zeitmarke or ‘date-stamp’ that precisely limits and specifies their provenance. This chapter argues that these two postulations about fantasy — that it is immutable, that it is always changing — vie with one another throughout Freud's oeuvre. The second, much less regarded, offers a much more open and modern theory of human subjective life than the first. This is elaborated in part through a reading of Freud's misrememberings of an episode from a novel by the late 19th-century French realist, Alphonse Daudet.

This chapter examines the influence of Don Quixote on nineteenth-century authors in France, Russia, and Spain. It shows the literary debt that these authors owe to Cervantes by looking at how they render their Don Quixotes and how they use Cervantes' literary devices. The discussions include French authors Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Daudet, Zola, and Proust; Russian authors Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov; and Spain's Benito Pérez Galdós.

This chapter gives an account of Marcel Proust's liaison with Lucien Daudet, a young man with similar neurotic tendencies as Proust—often moody and temperamental. Daudet had ambitions to be a painter and was often disturbed by Proust during art class in order to arrange the meetings between them. This obvious interest in Daudet would incur the jealousy of his love Reynaldo Hahn, but Proust would do nothing to discourage the idea that he preferred to spend his time with Daudet rather than Hahn. It would be a betrayal that would prove costly for Proust. This chapter thus relates the latter half of Hahn and Proust's relationship, one that would be riddled with jealousy and scorn, up until its end. This experience of jealousy, however, would later come out in his writing of Swann's Way wherein Louis de Robert would tell Proust his praise of a study of jealousy incomparable to any other in their literature.

Chapter 1 uncovers the first uses of the expression “la guerre totale” in 1916 and tracks the concept forward through interwar air power theory to present-day military historiography. Showing connections between total war and colonial violence and the mediating role of race in that connection, it focuses on L. E. O. Charlton, the RAF officer who, having set out for the Iraqi protectorate in 1922 resigned his post to protest British bombing policies in the region. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Charlton’s subsequent air power writings and his story about a pair of British runaways who are given shelter by Bedouins and are the sole survivors of an RAF raid that kills their hosts. The apparent contradictions between Charlton’s conscientious objection and his air power advocacy help make visible the imperial system of differential legal protection and violence exposure that was cemented by Britain during the interwar period.

Colonial and exotic objects in the novel are associated with fraudulent copies and pseudo-exotic marketing strategies. In addition, novels by Balzac, Daudet, Maupassant, and Zola connect French imperialism to fraudulent investment funds, financial speculation, and administrative corruption. In the later parts of the century this takes the forms of the ‘stockbroker novel’, or the novel of media scandal. Realism thus projects a colonial space offstage that is far removed from indulgent fantasies or wish fulfilment. The association of imperialism with fraud has a problematic relation to the idea of the mission civilisatrice that was beginning to play an important role in colonial propaganda by the end of the century.

Writers working within the realist mode emphasize the difficulties of direct knowledge of foreign lands and peoples. This chapter deals with the metatextual literary theme of reading and writing on the colonies as misguided, textually derivative, or deliberately fraudulent. Realist novels expose misrepresentation through the copying of earlier textual sources and through misguided daydreaming or Exotic Bovarysm. Colonial encounters are also present in framed or embedded tales, whose double narrative status emphasizes the problematic nature of colonial experience and its disjunction from metropolitan life. These various forms of metatextuality are part of a tradition that foregrounds self-conscious critique of colonial representation, or a ‘Critical Orientalism’.