This book is a contribution to the current controversy over the limits of English Studies. Arguing for an expansion of the new boundaries of ‘English’, and for the importance of psychoanalysis to the understanding of our literary and historical lives, the book looks at Israel/Palestine and South Africa, and their place in the English literary and cultural imagination. The book's fundamental question is related to the place of fantasy in public and private identities, and in these pages it pushes the investigation further into what might at first glance seem unlikely places. In September 1993, Israel and the PLO signed their first peace treaty; in April 1994, South Africa held its first non-racial democratic elections. The book persuasively puts the case that nothing demonstrates more clearly the need for a psychoanalytically informed understanding of historical process than these two arenas of historic conflict. In so doing, this book shows how the place of England and its writing in those histories emphasizes the unbreakable line that runs between literature and politics. Stretching the limits of the ‘canon’debate, the book offers the strongest rebuttal to critics who try to sever the links between the study of literature and culture and the making and unmaking of the modern world.