J. MACNAUGHTON, C. SAUNDERS (dir.), Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture

Jane MACNAUGHTON, Corinne SAUNDERS (dir.), Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture

New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 264 p.

ISBN : 1-4039-2199-7 

Book Description :

This collection of essays explores the relation between literature and madness from the Medieval to the Modern period. The essays examine how literature represents the experience of madness and cultural responses to it, and how madness may inspire creativity. The volume also illuminates the history of medicine, demonstrating the shifts and continuities in clinical understandings of and social attitudes to mental illness from the Middle Ages through to the "enlightened" notions of the Eighteenth Century to the development of psychoanalysis.

Table of Contents :

Introduction: J.Macnaughton & C.Saunders * PART ONE: READING MADNESS: LITERATURE IN MEDICINE * Madness and Creativity: Communication and Excommunication--R.Porter * Doctors as Performance Artists--M.O'Donnell * Ambiguity in Attitudes to Madness and Creativity--R.Downie * PART TWO: MADNESS IN LITERATURE--MEDIEVAL TO MODERN * 'The Thoughtful Maladie': Madness and Vision in Medieval Writing--C.Saunders * 'Inexpressibly Dreadful': Depression, Confession and Language in 18th Century Britain--A.Ingram * Wonders in the Deep: Cowper, Melancholy and Religion--S.Sykes * 'Mad as a Refuge from Unbelief': William Blake and the Sanity of Dissidence--D.Fuller * 'Why then Ile Fit You': Representations of Madness in Some Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Poems--M.O'Neill * Madness, Medicine and Creativity in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain--M.Evans * PART THREE: WRITING MADNESS: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE * Creative Writers and Psychopathology: the Cultural Consolations of 'The Wound and the Bow' Thesis: P.Waugh * The Myth of the Artist--A.Alvarez * 'Writing Madness' (Dialogue)--A.Byatt & I.Sodre * Breaking Down or Breaking Out? (Dialogue)--P.Barker & A.Piette * Index

Author Biography :

Jane MacNaughton is Director of the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine at the University of Durham.

Corinne Saunders is a Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham