On Reading the Will - 9781845194994

On Reading the WillLaw and Desire in Literature and Music\nAuthor(s): Jeremy Tambling\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Liverpool University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Liverpool University Press\nISBN-13: 9781845194994, 978-1845194994\nSynopsis\nThis book studies the will, will-power and wilfulness, the will to death or to power, and lack of will. It surveys many texts -- from Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot and D H Lawrence -- in order to analyse the history of its different concepts: rational/irrational drive, sexual appetite, or just testamentary, so asserting identity beyond death. Drawing on philosophies of the will in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book studies music as the embodied will in Wagner and Verdi. Considering the law and its prohibitions as a form of the will, it sees how these produce a perverse will. Drawing on Freud and Lacan it studies interrelationships between the law which prohibits and the desire which wills, how desire creates the law, and th.