Taking its point of departure in Kristeva’s original combination of speculative philosophy and psychoanalysis, Figural Space offers us the best of what literary theory has in store: real gems, as why Spenser’s epic anticipates Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or why The Prelude echoes Kant. Kristeva’s hitherto untapped critical energies provide a welcome corrective to historicist accounts of literature like those of Gadamer or Rancière, as Melaney’s inspired readings of Rimbaud, Proust, Blanchot, Rhys and Ishiguro abundantly prove.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania

I was struck by how Hegel’s aesthetics provides a significant and illuminating point of reference in this work. The book argues for a rehabilitation of Hegel in a cautious yet appreciative spirit. Negotiating its way between more traditional foundational readings and more recent hermeneutical ones, it brings its claim to bear on the writings of many authors, among whom areSpenser, Wordsworth, Shelly, Proust, Blanchot, and Kristeva. It pursues its notion of figural space in an intriguing and informative way, suggestive of the latent power of equivocal dialectic to be aesthetically illuminating in a variety of contexts and figures.

William Desmond, David Cook Chair in Philosophy, Villanova University; Thomas A.F. Kelly Visiting Chair in Philosophy, Maynooth University, Ireland; and professor of philosophy emeritus, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium

Through subtle readings of very different writers (poets, novelists and philosophers from a range of times and places) Melaney persuasively shows how the aesthetic, described as ‘a form of non-knowledge’, allows us to know so much that would otherwise elude us. A remarkable achievement.

Michael Wood, Professor of English, Princeton University