E. S. Dallas’s Literary Theory: The “Hidden Soul” and the Workings of the Imagination

The central thesis of this chapter is that, for E.S. Dallas, the primary recipient of literary meaning is the reader’s unconscious in a process whereby this meaning erupts in the conscious mind, always fragmented, vague and enigmatic. For Dallas, this vagueness does not point to the end of literary analysis, but highlights the reasons why we continue to analyse a literary work: there will always be something that we feel we understood but that remains unsaid. The name he gave to the locus of this pristine, unconscious meaning is the “hidden soul” as a means to suggest that just as the soul is a cognate for the conscious mind, the hidden soul refers to the existence of a hidden or unconscious mind.