Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Loughborough University, UK. He was previously Professor in Literature at the University of Florida, USA. His teaching and research is concerned with 19th- and 20th-century British literary and cultural studies, literary theory, the poetics and politics of identity, and the idea of the city. He is the series editor of Transitions and has written many course texts for Literature students, notably The English Literature Companion.

Abbreviations - Preface and Acknowledgements - Affirmative Resistances: an Introduction, in Passing - Alice in Wonderland: an Architecture of Knowledges? - The Writing on the Wall or, making a Spectacle of Yourself: Projection and The Yellow Wallpaper - 'The Nervous Laughter of Writing': Stephen Hero, Onions, Laughter and Other Lawless Affirmations - Ulysses: Memory's Identities - Meshes of the Afternoon: the Dissonant Identities of Avant-Garde Film and Problems of Interpretation - Affirmative Memories, Resistant Projections: Sylvie Germain's La Pleurante des rues de Prague - The Place between: Sending Love and Resisting Identity or, between Jacques Derrida, Daniel Deronda, and Michel Deguy - Works Cited - Index

In this wide-ranging, challenging theoretical study, Julian Wolfreys offers close readings of films, novels and poetry in order to draw attention to the ways in which texts resist acts of reading by performing their own idiomatic, wayward identities. Looking at the construction of identity in Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, Maya Deren, Sylvie Germain, Jacques Derrida, Michel Deguy, and George Eliot, Wolfreys asks the reader to reassess the textual performance of identity by attending to a rhetoric which is simultaneously both resistant to mastery and affirmative of dissonance.