Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture

by Corinne J. Saunders (Editor), Jane Macnaughton (Editor)

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.

258 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 2005

About the author

Corinne Saunders is Professor in the Department of English Studies. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas, and has particular interests in romance writing. She is also interested in gender studies and the history of medicine. She has recently published a monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval Romance (2010), for which she was awarded AHRC-funded additional leave and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She is the author of The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001), and over thirty essays and articles on a wide range of literary and cultural topics. She has edited a Blackwell Critical Guide to Chaucer (2001); A Blackwell Companion to Romance: from Classical to Contemporary (2004); Cultural Encounters in Medieval Romance (2005); A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2006); and (with Françoise le Saux and Neil Thomas) Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses (2004); (with Jane Macnaughton), Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture (2005); (with David Fuller) Pearl: a Modernised Version by Victor Watts (2005); (with Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton), The Body and the Arts (2009). Her edited collection, A Blackwell Companion to Medieval Poetry, was published in March 2010. She is the English editor of the international journal of medieval studies, Medium Ævum; and editor in overall charge of Medieval Studies (1100-1500) for the major online resource, The Literary Encyclopedia. She is the Director of Durham University's Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Associate Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities, funded by the Wellcome Trust. She has also co-organised two Public Lecture Series in the University, ‘Madness and Creativity: The Mind, Medicine and Literature’, and ‘Flesh and Blood: The Body and the Arts’. She teaches across the range of Old and Middle English language and literature, as well as History of the English Language, Old French, and some Renaissance topics, at both BA and MA level. She currently supervises a number of PhD students working on later medieval literary topics, and welcomes enquiries from postgraduate applicants in these areas.

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Note to self:

Table of Contents:
Introduction / J.Macnaughton & C.Saunders
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
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
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.