Room: Penguin Archive Project Office
Phone: +44 (0)117 331 8373
Fax: 0117 331 7933
Email: George.E.Donaldson@bristol.ac.uk
As Research Fellow and Co-Investigator in the AHRC-funded Penguin Archive Project (Principal Investigator, John Lyon), my role is partly managerial. Areas of the Penguin Archive which I have investigated are the correspondence files of the Pelican/Penguin Freud Library, the Penguin English Library, and the Pelican/Penguin Guide to English Literature; and the papers of Michael Rubinstein, Penguin Books' lawyer, in Regina v Penguin Books Ltd, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover prosecution and trial for obscenity, in 1960.
I also have a research interest in Freud and Shakespeare. This interest has a double focus: first, a critical reassessment of Freud's 'readings' of Shakespeare, in his essays on particular plays (Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear and Macbeth), and in his case histories (e.g. 'The Rat Man') and theoretical works-particularly in psychopathology, metapsychology (e.g. 'The Unconscious' and 'Mourning and Melancholia'), and applied psychoanalysis (e.g. 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood', 'The "Uncanny" ', and 'Dostoevsky and Parricide')-where Hamlet is a centrally recurrent concern; and, second, a critical investigation of plays which, although not analysed by Freud himself, seem peculiarly susceptible to a psychoanalytic approach and interpretation. The purpose of this double focus is not so much to offer 'psychoanalytic interpretations' of the plays as to interrogate Freud's 'readings' of them and the uses to which he put Shakespeare in his psychoanalytic thinking; and, from this perspective, to present a critically speculative reading of a number of Shakespeare’s plays, enquiring into the usefulness of psychoanalysis as an interpretative tool.
Other areas of research interest are in Romanticism, especially Blake and Shelley, and in D.H. Lawrence; and, arising out of the specific interest in Freud and Shakespeare described above, in the theoretical and practical applicability of psychoanalysis generally to literary creativity and literary texts.
I am now semi-retired, and teach some seminars in the following units only:
(jointly with Dr J.M.Lyon)