Troubling Legacies is at once scholarly and provocative. Peter Sjølyst-Jackson draws in thoughtful and rigorous ways on psychoanalysis and deconstruction (especially the writings of Derrida and de Man) in order to throw new light on our understanding of the modern novel and fascism. He does this by focusing on Knut Hamsun, many of whose novels are easily available in English translation but whose work remains curiously neglected in the English-speaking world. Sjølyst-Jackson foregrounds the extent to which Hamsun's work is in fact bound up with the US (where Hamsun spent a considerable period in the 1880s), and also attends to how he was read by writers as varied as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and Franz Kafka. Sjølyst-Jackson's study does an excellent job of bringing out Hamsun's links with mainstream Modernist writers in English, while demonstrating the continuing richness of deconstructive and psychoanalytic thinking for understanding modern literature.

- Professor Nicholas Royle, School of English, University of Sussex, UK,