Writing And Madness

This is the author's most influential work of literary theory and criticism in which she explores the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Out of Her Mind, edited by Rebecca Shannonhouse, captures the best literature by and about women struggling with madness. A remarkable chronicle of gifted and unconventional women who have spun their inner turmoil into literary gold, the collection features classic short stories, breathtaking literary excerpts, key historical writings, and previously unpublished letters by Zelda Fitzgerald. Shannonhouse’s recent anthology, Under the Influence: The Literature of Addiction, is also available as a Modern Library Paperback Original.

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire. The associations between madness and language—and madness and silence—preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing—particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette—he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness. Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and intellectual development.

Language has always been used as a measure of social, ideological, and psychological contexts for the exploration of madness. The Madhouse of Language considers the relations between madness and language from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the close analysis of both medical records and texts by mad writers. It presents a highly original account of the linguistic relations between madness and sanity, of the appropriation by sane writers of the forms of English, and of attempts by mad patients to gain access to the expressive potential of language.

This book examines one work dealing with madness from each of five prominent authors. Including discussion of Fowles, Hamsun, Hesse, Kafka, and Poe, it delineates the specific type of madness the author associates with each text, and explores the reason for that - such as a historical moment, physical pressure (such as starvation), or the author’s or his narrator’s perspective. The project approaches the texts it explores from the perspective of a writer of fiction as well as from the perspective of a critic, and discusses them as unique manifestations of literary madness. It is of particular significance for those interested in the interplay of fiction, literary criticism, and psychology.

This book considers the ways in which madness has been portrayed in writing by women writers. It readdresses the madwoman trope, opening up multiple sites of literary madness, examining places and spaces outside of the ‘madwoman in the attic.’ In particular, a transnational approach sets itself up against a Eurocentric approach to literary madness. Women novelists from the Brontës to the Indian writer Arundhati Roy and Arab writers Fadia Faqir and Miral al-Tahawy interrogate patriarchal societies and oppressive cultures. Female characters who suffer from madness are strikingly similar in their revolutionary subversion of patriarchal environments.

Large collection of stories, essays, and reviews by Gothic novelist Patrick McGrath. Illustrated.