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Freud argued in his celebrated essay that ‘the family romance’ had a direct social consequence, since ‘the progress of society in general rests upon the opposition between the generations’. This chapter shows that Leslie Stephen and daughter Virginia Woolf effectively demonstrate the connection between Freud's contentions, and this is especially clear in their relations with the 18th century. The Stephen family emerged as a social, religious, and intellectual force at the very close of the 18th century, a period with which later members of the family, from Sir James Stephen (1789-1859), to his sons James Fitzjames (1829-94) and Leslie (1832-1904), and thence Virginia, became notably preoccupied. It is this Stephen family romance with the 18th century that is used here to explore a very particular dimension of the Victorians' preoccupation with their immediate predecessor generations. Central to this family romance is a rebellion against Christianity, from Leslie Stephen's open advocacy of agnosticism to Virginia Woolf's uncompromising atheism.

This chapter outlines the ambivalences of the imaginary home created by Nabokov in and through his aesthetic language, presenting a reading focused on three areas: the poetics of memory, the text’s family romance and aesthetic language. It studies the dual gestures where the imaginary home narratives emphasises and deflects the losses that keep revisiting the survivor text, and ends with a section on the referentiality in Nabokov’s ‘story of style’ and the link between troubling facticity and aesthetic language.

Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on The Nun's Story, a film which still polarizes viewers more than fifty years after its debut. Feminist cultural critics have found it especially hard to sympathize with the inner spiritual drama of the film's conflicted protagonist Sister Luke or appreciate the all-time great film performance of Audrey Hepburn; and this chapter suggests that their animus stems from political hostility to the nun's struggles with the religious vow of unquestioning obedience. It argues that the nun has internalized an alternative code of obedience deriving from the history of her Catholic family romance, that is to say, her lifelong devotion to a loving and approving doctor father, and her core desire to emulate him professionally. It details the conflict Sister Luke experiences between her original family romance and the Catholic romance of the cloister with its surrogate family structure, and between her professional desire to do the nursing work she loves in the Congo and her religious desire to become the perfect nun her order wants her to be.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's concern with changes in the ‘likely stories’ or ‘mythologies’ of identity in the century since Freud, which looks in particular in Freud's varying assumptions about whether the fundamental features of human development and predicament do change over time; Freud's essay ‘Family Romances’, which concerns what Freud regards as universal fantasies of adoption, but is pegged to presumably local, realistic circumstances, illustrates the question. The chapter also considers the reliance on Greek tragedy that underpins Freud's theories as typical of the tendency, in the 19th century, to use Greek tragedy as matter for philosophical thinking.

This chapter explores the extent to which the traumas of the 1970s were displaced onto the family and crisis in the political culture of popular Hindi cinema. It considers the blockbuster trilogy: Deewaar (1975), Trishul (1978), and Shakti (1982). The narrative of Deewaar, which focuses on child violence, is widely understood to symbolize the States upon its citizens. The narratives of Trishul and Shakti exposed both the cinemas social work in India and the social work it did for the nation. The chapter proposes the social function of cinema as Family Romance, where India’s nation plays the role of the mother and the family plays the role of the India’s nation.

Chapter 3 takes us through Fanon’s complex relations with French society as a kind of ‘family romance’. The chapter engages with the interplay of language, gender and colonial politics, critiquing along the way simplistic, non-intersectional analyses which privilege, say, gender (e.g. Bergner) to the exclusion of racial difference. The chapter concentrates on Fanon’s reading of Capécia and Maran, exploring the ways in which both language and sexuality are marked by the dimension of colonial ideology. The chapter engages with the elements of this family romance, analysing how the notion of race traverses gender and sexual politics.

This chapter discusses psychoanalysis as a cultural archive of tropes that is often called upon and exposed by both Hitchcock and Nabokov in their texts, and which is also used as the critical framework that supports the readings presented in this book. It notes that these readings have shown the same patterns, especially in the family romances of Nabokov and in the moments of home paranoia of Hitchcock.

This chapter examines the themes of modernity and nationalism in Soewarsih Djojopoespito's novel Buiten het gareel (Free from Restraints). Written in Dutch and published in Holland in 1940, Buiten het gareel is about the romance and narrativity of revolutionary activity rather than a novel that hides phantoms from the past. It may be considered a neurotic family romance, or family narrative, in the sense that it portrays and then deconstructs the romantic nationalist imaginings of the time. Soewarsih explores the limits of Native Indies women's desires and possibilities for emancipation in the intertwined spaces of personal and political life. This chapter first provides a background on Buiten het gareel before drawing on the idea of the family romance to look at the early Indonesian nationalist period and especially Achmad Soekarno, Indoonesia's first president and leader of the emerging ideological field of Indies nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. It also discusses the issues of Javanese/Sundanese traditions, patriarchy, and the women's movement as tackled by Soewarsih in Buiten het gareel.

This chapter explores the national implications of the politics of victimization that Traversay inherited from the early colonial period. In 1806, for a French audience, this author rearticulated discussions about victimized white Creoles and underscored their forgotten contribution to French nationalism. He presents a political and cultural propaganda that re-evaluates the old monarchic regime in an ambivalent fashion, particularly Dangerous Creole Liaisons in response to Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s eighteenth-century vision of Creole culture. Traversay creates the first (and possibly last) national romance around transatlantic family ties that shows a vibrant allegiance to béké ideology in Martinique. In his novel, representations of sexuality and the threat of forbidden matrimony portray a victimized Creole society struggling to define and protect its idea of the new nation: a community under siege. The difficult amorous relationships between two Creoles, Carina and Zémédare, are shown as threatened by French sexual license and sociocultural transgression. Such forbidden interactions—among them, Carina’s misguided engagement to the libertine Médilore and the marriage proposal that the mulâtresse Zoé receives from a Frenchman—symbolize the dangerous liaisons that exist between Martinique and a decadent France. The novel concludes with Carina’s legitimate marriage to the gallant Zémédare, while the idea of a white Creole nation remains unresolved.

The introduction provides the historical and conceptual backdrop to the argument that monolingualism is a more recent phenomenon than multilingualism and elaborates on the notion of the “postmonolingual condition.” It charts the emergence of the monolingual paradigm in late-eighteenth-century Europe, with emphasis on the conceptual impact of the thought of Herder and Schleiermacher. The chapter also provides a brief history of the term “mother tongue” and discusses feminist, media theoretical, and psychoanalytic perspectives on this concept before offering a new reading of it as a “linguistic family romance.” It situates the present study in relationship to literary and linguistic scholarship on multilingualism, as well as in relationship to German, German-Jewish, and Turkish-German Studies. Through an analysis of the conceptual artwork Wordsearch: A Translinguistic Sculpture by artist Karin Sander, the chapter argues for the importance of a critical approach to multilingualism that takes the monolingual paradigm into account, even in an age of globalization and transnational flows.

Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ (1910) can be considered as a paradigmatic example of the author’s use of family relations as a prism for examining a number of issues. While the story’s focus on the family romance suggests a reconfiguration of the Künstlerroman motif in Mansfield’s oeuvre, ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ can also be read as an elaboration of the trope of national allegory. In proposing that individual destiny can be read as an allegory of a whole society, I draw, for a working hypothesis, on Jameson’s foundational article, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986). Although it has been legitimately criticised by postcolonial critics such as Aijaz Ahmad (1987), Jameson’s article on national allegory has recently been defended by other scholars, including Imre Szeman (2001) and Neil Lazarus (2011), thus enabling a cautious and contingent interpretation of the term. Finally, I reflect on how recent texts by Māori writers, such as Patricia Grace’s ‘Letters from Whetu’ (1980) and Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986) engage with and reshape Mansfield’s cultural and literary heritage, offering postcolonial rewritings of her work.

This chapter asks what Sophocles' Oedipus the King, the tragedy on which Freud based his radical theory of human subjectivity, might offer in relation to the new kinds of identity and family that have emerged in the century since. In particular, it considers how Freud's emphasis on sexual fantasy and childhood has obscured Sophocles' stress on the significance of parents', not children's, desires and fears. Oedipus's birth father Laius is so fearful of what a son might do to him that he throws him out; his adoptive father, on the other hand, is profoundly loving. Another proto-parental theme of the play which Freud ignores is childlessness, apaidia. This theme is prominent in today's culture (especially through issues of infertility and new reproductive technologies) but was largely unspoken in Freud's.

This chapter is divided into discussions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. For both novels it considers the framing of class identity and realist uniqueness as simultaneously grounded in the real and as products of fantasy, especially in the mapping of class onto family articulated by Freud’s idea of the family romance. Both novels use the fantasmatic device of coincidence to shore up the reality of familial connections. The chapter also discusses the structuring of realist character in the blankness and fungibility of Dickens’s Oliver and Hardy’s Elizabeth-Jane, as well as the idea of secondariness in the latter, continuing a discussion of the tension between realist subjectivity and uniqueness, on the one hand, and a sensational emphasis on position on the other that began in chapter 1 and continues throughout the book.

Chapter 4 begins by deploying Elizabeth Fowler’s concept of social persons, which she uses to understand how characters are built up as composite figures out of the raw materials of pre-formed social typologies. It modifies her argument somewhat to posit that fictional character is formed on the basis of folk taxonomies, including popular psychologies, physiognomies, and characterologies, as well as models of social hierarchy and legal and religious order. The case studies in this chapter include a reading of Hamlet on the basis of humoral medicine, particularly beliefs about melancholy, and of the figures of the revenger and the malcontent as they are deployed in the genre of the revenge tragedy; and a study of character typologies in the novels of Dickens through the lens of the family romance

In her book The Mother/Daughter Plot, Marianne Hirsch investigates the divergent versions of the family romance that surface in female-authored novels by focusing on the relation between mothers and daughters. This chapter examines James Tiptree Jr's ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’, a story about alien encounter, as a mother/daughter narrative in the guise of science fiction. More specifically, it reads the text as a choric fantasy; the chora, a notion derived from Julia Kristeva, refers to the maternally connoted dimension of the construction of the subject, which stands in a dialogical relation to the paternally connoted symbolic. By reading Tiptree's text in light of Kristeva's theory, the chapter analyses the narrative text and the feminist reception of Kristeva's theory of the maternal. It also argues that mother/daughter plots in science fiction may be expressed in rather unusual and sometimes opaque terms, such as in the case of ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’.

This chapter posits a psychoanalytic reading of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s short story ‘I fatali’ (‘The Fated Ones’) published posthumously in the collection Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) (1869). It focuses on the mortal rivalry between the father and son figures, Count Sagrezwitch and Baron Saternez, who become known in late nineteenth-century Milanese society of the short story as true embodiments of fatal beings belonging to popular superstition, known as jinxes – bringers of bad fortune, illness, harm, and even death to others. Drawing from Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Doppelgänger, it is argued that these protagonists emerge as complementary doubles for one another, as opposing incarnations of Death in the form of mysterious foreigners. This chapter also highlights the post-Unification, socio-cultural undertones of Tarchetti’s fantastic tale, affirms the existence of an Italian Gothic, and reveals the author’s portrayal of death’s spectacular nature.