States of Fantasy is Jacqueline Rose's striking contribution to the current controversy about the nature and limits of English studies. Why has relatively little attention been paid to Israel/Palestine and South Africa, both of which have the strongest historical and political links to Britain as well as to each other? What can these two arenas of historic conflict tell us about the limits of the literary imagination?

What new imaginary worlds are being built in the present at the very moment when the literary institution attempts to shed the false dreams of the past?

In September 1993, Israel and the PLO signed their first peace treaty; in April 1994, South Africa held its first non-racial elections. Jacqueline Rose uses the occasion of these epoch-making events to track the place of the unconscious in our literary and historical lives. States of Fantasy persuasively argues that nowhere demonstrates more clearly than these two ongoing histories the importance of psychoanalysis to an understanding of public and private identities.

Affirming the unbreakable line that runs between literature and politics, States of Fantasy offers the strongest rebuttal of critics who try to sever the links between the study of literature and culture and the making and unmaking of the modern world.