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This collection of essays explores the relation between literature and madness from the Medieval through 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. The volume includes original contributions from well-known writers and specialists, such as the late Sir Roy Porter, Al Alvarez, Pat Barker, Michael O'Donnell and A. S Byatt.

Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture

Introduction: C.Saunders &J.Macnaughton 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': Poetry and Madness from Wordsworth to Berryman; 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 On Writing Madness (Dialogue); A.Byatt & I.Sodré Breaking Down or Breaking Out? (Dialogue); P.Barker & A.Piette Index