| All About Love | 2011 |
| Mad Bad and Sad | 2008 |
| Free Expression is no offence | 2005 |
| The Cabaret | 2004 |
| Freud's Women | 2000 |
| 1999 | |
| Simone De Beauvoir | 1988 |
| 1984 | |
| Femininity and the Creative Imagination | 1973 |
|
All About Love: Anatomy of an unruly emotion - Virago/LittleBrown 2011 - Pre-order |
|
|
Unruly, unpredictable, love is a maddening deity. In this insightful and eloquent meditation on that many-splendoured thing, Lisa Appignanesi draws on history, philosophy, psychology, literature, popular culture and her own experience in order to tangle with love's paradoxes through the span of our lives. Beginning with the rose-tinted raptures of first love, she proceeds to love in marriage, the passions of triangulated love, jealousy and adultery, love in the family, and friendship. By illuminating the expectations, the joys and difficulties, and the cultural undercurrents that accompany each stage. Appignanesi raises provocative questions about love in the twenty-first century: has the unbinding of obstacles to love emptied it of meaning? Do our desires for variety and experimentation result in increased anxiety? What gains and losses have come from greater openness and equality and the burgeoning sphere of virtual fantasy? All About Love shows us how, without the varying attachments love puts in place, we would have little of our individuality, less literature and, arguably, no society. This book, as rewarding as it is captivating, will leave you a little wiser about the emotion that rules our lives. ISBN: |
|
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present - Virago/LittleBrown 2008; paperback 2009 - buy book |
|
|
Winner of the MJA Award, Short-listed for the Warwick, Mind and Duff-Cooper Prizes. 'The triumph of Mad, Bad and Sad is to mix evocative case studies with potted histories of the great and good of psychology and psychiatry... an intelligent and academically rigorous study.' - Observer 'Sophisticated, rigorously written, full of striking subtexts, Mad, Bad and Sad is an entertaining and well-researched book that avoids easy answers.' - Andrew Scull, Times Literary Supplement 'A glittering intellectual history of women, madness and the mind doctors.' - Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph 'Fascinating... In this sweeping, humane and formidably researched study Appignanesi does what all the very best investigative writers and journalists do: she raises questions for us to answer.' - Carmen Callil, Daily Telegraph 'Mad, Bad and Sad is constantly interesting... wonderfully engaging and enlightening' - Rachel Bowlby, Independent 'A work of wit, wisdom and richness... A grand tour of derangement, from matricide to anorexia.' - John Leonard, Harpers 'Informative in startling ways, and never dull in the academic way, Appignanesi's genuinely new History of the Mind Doctors is a subtle and accessible account of that perhaps most daunting of modern relationships, the one between the Mind Doctor and his female patient. Because Appignanesi has a complex story to tell there is no blaming at work in this wonderful book, but a shrewd and sympathetic apprehension of what is at stake in the difficult histories of both the Mind Doctors and those they seek to help. It is a remarkable achievement.' - Adam Phillips ISBN: Published by Norton in the US |
|
Free Expression is no offence: |
|
|
A law criminalizing incitement to religious hatred has been high on the Labour Government's list of priorities. It is a law with wide-ranging implications for freedom of expression in Britain: it could be used to censor anyone whether writer, comedian or person in the street who wishes to make a statement about religion that others might find offensive. "Free Expression is No Offence" tackles the issue of free speech in the post-9/11 world from a variety of angles. Its authors draw on their wide-ranging experience to show just why it is that attempts to curtail our freedom must be vigorously resisted by anyone who wants all faiths and none to live peaceably side by side and our many cultures to thrive. |
|
| The Cabaret - Yale University Press 2004 - buy book | |
 ‘Lisa Appignanesi 's well-researched and gracefully written Cabaret is as frisky, smart, mischievous, and high-stepping as the art form she comprehensively chronicles.' John Lahr, The New Yorker This captivating book presents a uniquely comprehensive cultural history of cabaret, where the most radical of artists, poets, writers, musicians and theatre directors have gathered since 1881, when Le Chat Noir, opened its doors in Paris to become a meeting place of the avant-garde and a laboratory for subversive laughter. Appignanesi traces the journey of cabaret across Europe and to the United States , through its links with the Futurists and Dadaists, from St Petersburg to London and Zurich , and into its Weimar heyday. This new edition comes with a wealth of new material from eastern Europe and explores the post-war life of the cabaret , as well as the splintering of the form into stand-up comedy and club life. ‘Wonderfully research and beautifully illustrated ( Cabaret is) and admirable supplement to the history of the twentieth century.' Jonathan Miller New and revised edition, Yale University Press £25.00 ISBN 0 300 10580 0 |
|
| Freud's Women - Phoenix 2005 - buy book | |
 With John ForresterSigmund Freud is one of the most influential thinkers of the twetieth century. His ideas permeate our everyday thinking about life, love, gender, the family and the relation between the sexes. These ideas took on shape and substance in the same period that `the woman question' became a burning issue. Sometimes championed as a liberator of women, Freud has also been virulently attacked for his theories of the feminine and for elevating his personal prejudices to the height of universal pronouncement.Freud's Women probes biography and case history, mines dreams, correspondence and journals, and examines theory to chart Freud's views on femininity. It also tells the many storeis of Freud's women and explores their influence on him and his on them: dutiful daughter Anna, who carried on his work; the novelist and turn-of-the-century femme fatale, Lou Salome; Marie Bonaparte, who mixed royalty and perversity with effortless ease and became the head of the French psychoanalytic movement; the early hysterics who were the cornerstone of psychoanalysis - all these and more emerge vividly from the pages of this important study as it assesses Freud's contemporary legacy.`This wonderful book is the tale of the great twentieth-century love affair with Freudian thought. It is an overblown historical romance that has at its centre the riddle of femininity itself. ' Suzanne Moore, The Guardian`A marvellously rich and engrossing work of intellectual history, deftly composed.' Richard Wollheim. The New York Times Book Review`Intelligent, sophisticated and written with great flair…. Challenges the prejudices of Freudians and feminists alike.' Roy Porter`An ambitious history of Freud's relationships with women - from dutiful daughter to psychoanalystical disciple, from classic hysteric to feminist critic… a lucid, sympathetic account.' Elaine Showalter, The Times Literay Supplement Books of the Year. New Revised Edition: Penguin Books, 2000 The Other Press, N.Y. 2001 Original Edition: Weidenfeld Orion, 1992 Basic Books, N,Y., 1992. Translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Polish |
|
| Losing the Dead - Vintage 2000 - buy book | |
 `A compassionate and intelligent memoir… This dramatic story, written with a generoisty of spirit and gorgeous flashes of wit, is a voyage of discovery both for the restless dead and Appignanesi's own brave spirit.' The TimesAs her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew.This is the moving, rarely told story, of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of migration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community. Appignanesi brilliantly explores the workings of personal and public memory, the legacies of internalized racism and the myths families create in order to make life bearable. Short-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Wingate Literary Prize 2000. Profound and tragic…a powerful and tender memorial.' Independent` Remarkable… beautifully told and permeated with the wisdom of those who survive against all odds.' Financial Times `Vivid, beautifully written, and all the more poignant for its lack of piety… This is the work of remembering in its truest, and fullest, sense. 'Chatto & Windus, 1999; Vintage 2000 MacArthur and Co. 2000 Translated into Dutch |
|
| Simone de Beauvoir - Haus Publishing Limited 2005 - buy book | |
 `Gifted with an irrepressible and inexhaustible energy, Simone de Beauvoir had that rare kind of intelligence which allowed her to seem eternally young and grow more radical with time.'This is the fascinating life story of a woman whose struggle for intellectual and sexual freedom inspired several generations. Appignanesi subtly evokes the particular flavour of Simone de Beauvoir's singular life - as philosopher, novelist, leading member of the existentialist movement, socialist, and feminist, but also a woman who described her unique partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre as `the one undoubted success in my life'. The conflicts caused by de Beauvoir's unquestioning devotion to Sartre are vividly illuminated, as are her writing, the contradictions in her feminism and the inextricable links between her life and her intellectual project. Haus Publishers 2005. Translated into Spanish and German |
|
| Femininity and the Creative Imagination: Henry James, Marcel Proust and Robert Musil 1973 | |
 FEMININITY AND THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION: Henry James, Marcel Proust and Robert Musil 1973We have had enough of `the pistol, the pirate, the police, the wild and tame beast, Henry James declared. It was time to look to the women. `It is the ladies…who have done most to remind us of man's relations with himself, that is with women.' In this study, Appignanesi takes James at his word. Women were at the centre of his work, his choice vehicles, whether romantically headstrong or tragic. But he was only one of the writers of his period to focus in on women. This examination of what is effectively a `myth of femininity' probes the works of James, Proust and the great Austrian writer, Robert Musil, to see how these major figures looked to women and ideas of the feminine - however differently - as matter for their art. Vision Press 1973 |
|
An intimate and illuminating look at how love shapes our lives and our world.
From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Théroigne de Méricourt, the Fury of the Gironde, who descended from the bloody triumphs of the French Revolution to untameable insanity in La Salpetrière asylum, to Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan’s construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists.
Lisa Appignanesi (editor)