Madness And Creativity In Literature And Culture

by Saunders, Corinne; Macnaughton, Jane

• ISBN13: 9781403921994
• ISBN10: 1403921997
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-02
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgements	x
Notes on Contributors	xi
Introduction	1	(18)
Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton
Part I Reading Madness: Literature in Medicine
1. Madness and Creativity: Communication and Excommunication	19	(16)
Roy Porter
2. Doctors as Performance Artists	35	(14)
Michael O'Donnell
3. Madness in Literature: Device and Understanding	49	(18)
Robin Downie
Part II Madness in Literature: Medieval to Modern
4. 'The thoghtful maladie': Madness and Vision in Medieval Writing	67	(21)
Corinne Saunders
5. 'Inexpressibly Dreadful': Depression, Confession and Language in Eighteenth-Century Britain	88	(16)
Allan Ingram
6. Wonders in the Deep: Cowper, Melancholy and Religion	104	(17)
Stephen Sykes
7. 'Mad as a refuge from unbelief': Blake and the Sanity of Dissidence	121	(23)
David Fuller
8. 'Why then Ile Fit You': Poetry and Madness from Wordsworth to Berryman	144	(15)
Michael O'Neill
9. Madness, Medicine and Creativity in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain	159
Martyn Evans
Part III Writing Madness: Psychoanalysis and Literature
10. Creative Writers and Psychopathology: The Cultural Consolations of `The Wound and the Bow' Thesis	177	(17)
Patricia Waugh
11. The Myth of the Artist	194	(8)
Al Alvarez
12. On Writing Madness	202	(20)
A.S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre
13. Breaking Down or Breaking Out?	222	(15)
Pat Barker and Adam Piette
Index	237