This work demonstrates the importance of Slavoj Žižek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Žižek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian sychoanalysis and German Idealism, resulting in a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications in the analysis of literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Žižekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. There is alsoan essay by Žižek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. This bookaffirms Žižek's value to literary studies and also offers a rigorous model of Žižekian criticism.

Russell Sbriglia is Assistant Professor of English at Seton Hall University, New Jersey.