Lexis Complexes: Literary Interventions by Nelson Hilton Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1995,  225 pp., $45.00.

The title of this book refers to its author's belief that there are unconscious, overdetermined words or condensations of words that give rise, through their occult linguistic connections, to a verbal network peculiar to the individual writer and are an indication of his preoccupations. These connections, Hilton thinks, are made not only through associations of meaning or context but also through such purely verbal associations as homophones, puns, double meanings, anagrams and the like detected by the assiduous reader. Further, Hilton thinks these preoccupations are derived from the writer's early object relationships “inaccessible and textualised though they must be” (p. 10). Using biography and “the inflections and associations to be found in the individual's semantics” (p. 10), he seeks to discover and disclose these. He also relies heavily on another source, which is contentious, that is, his own associations to the text as reader. As he is going beyond the straightforward personal and cultural responses to the text to include ingenious connections made by the reader, such as puns and anagrams, he exposes himself to the charge often made against some current literary analysis—arbitrariness and the imposition of the critic's own overvalued ideas.