Reading with Peter Brooks

Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at University College London. Most recently, she is the author of Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024) and Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025).

• AcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIntroductionRachel BowlbyI. Reading Brooks1. Afforded by the Plot: Downstream ResponsesTerence Cave 2. The Critical ImaginationAlex Woloch3. Reading For and Against the PlotDavid Shields 4. Melodrama or Irony?Aaron Matz II. Brooks Reading5. Storied by SeductionJanet Beizer 6. Reading with BalzacMartine Reid7. Reading for the Plot, or Rereading Stendhal in 2023Susanna Lee 8. Knowledge and its LimitationsAnn Jefferson III. Psychoanalysis9. What Does a Worldly Criticism Mean?Alessia Ricciardi 10. Telling Stories: From Stories to Talking to Metaphor to NarrativeJuliet Mitchell 11. Looking After the Reader? Transference, Tutelage and the NovelSarah Raff IV. Histories12. Brooks in the Ruins: Flaubert and the Politics of NarrativeMaurice Samuels 13. The Fingerprint StoryRachel Bowlby 14. Brooks’s James: A Blind Man in ParisCaroline Weber V. Brooks’s Yale15. Intellectual TrajectoryPeter Brooks 16. Peter Brooks and the Interdisciplinary HumanitiesSarah Winter 17. Majoring in LiteratureDavid Marshall VI. Disciplinary Stories18. ‘Confessing’ the Power of Education: Personal Stories in Policy,Advocacy and FundraisingChiara Benetollo 19. The Stakes of the Plot: Narrative in LawTal Kastner 20. Prison TermPeter BrooksIndex

These lively, brief but extremely efficient essays by a host of distinguished contributors highlight the range and impact over the years of Peter Brooks's scholarship in the overlapping areas of narrative studies, psychoanalysis and law. Every reader will find something of interest here.