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Overview
In Writing in Between, Beth Sharon Ash develops an important theoretical framework for interpreting Conrad's signal texts and his situation as an author. Using relational psychoanalysis, Ash reinserts into the literary conversation the idea of the psychologically inflected subject. She integrates authorial and fictional subjectivity within specific historical contexts, thus lending agency and density to the "relational subject" without neglecting the social forces which shape it. Organized around the thematics of unfinished mourning, this book carefully positions Conrad as a writer caught 'in between,' as both a figure of alienation critically disenchanted with British imperialism, and an orphan of genius desperately desiring a fit with his adopted culture. Through fine-grained, often surprising readings of Conrad's novels and broad analyses of psychoanalytic and modernist criticism, Ash persuasively refocuses how one reads Conrad and, in doing this, retheorizes the subject and its literary relations.