Madness and Literature: What Fiction Can Do for the Understanding of Mental Illness(Language, Discourse and Mental Health)

Mental illness has been a favourite topic for authors throughout the history of literature, while psychologists and psychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have in turn been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and literature share the endeavour to explore and explain the human mind and behaviour, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality. Using a theoretical approach that is eclectic and transdisciplinary, this volume engages with literature’s multifarious ways of probing minds and bodies in a state of mental ill health. The cases and the theory are in dialogue with a clinical approach, addressing issues and diagnoses such as trauma, psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, hoarding disorder, PTSD and Digital Sexual Assault. The chapters in Part I address literary representations of madness with a historical awareness, outlining the socio-political potentials of madness literature. Part II investigates how representations of mental illness in literature can offer unique insights into the subjective experience of alternative states of mind. Part III reflects on how literary cases can be applied to help inform mental health education, how they can be used therapeutically and how they are giving credence to new diagnoses. Throughout the book, the contributors consider how the language and discourses of literature—both stylistically and theoretically—can teach us something new about what it means to be mentally unwell.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Madness and Literature and the Health Humanities Lasse Raaby Gammelgaard DOI: 10.47788/AFZH5419 Part I: Literary History and Socio-Political Perspectives 1. Layla and Majnun in Historical and Contemporary Conceptions of Madness in Islamic Psychology Alan Weber DOI: 10.47788/RRMJ3362 2. The Anti-Psychiatry Ethos in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy Shoshana Benjamin DOI: 10.47788/YEGJ4716 3. Apartheid’s Garden: Dismantling Madness in J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K Sebastian C. Galbo DOI: 10.47788/TJNQ3925 4. Sniffs and Dribblers: Poppy Shakespeare and the Identities of Madness Clare Allan DOI: 10.47788/SEHO5518 Part II: Literary Theory and Experiencing Mental Illness 5. Reading Shattering Minds and Extended Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Anna Ovaska DOI: 10.47788/KVCT9727 6. Spill the Words: Speechlessness and Creativity in the Writing of Janet Frame Mary Elene Wood DOI: 10.47788/ZEIP9285 7. Pronominal Shifts and the Confusion of Self with Not-Self Alice Hervé DOI: 10.47788/KQGN8180 8. Rethinking Clinical and Critical Perspectives on Psychosis in Kathy Acker’s Writing Charley Baker DOI: 10.47788/KIQF3977 9. Countering the DSM in Poetry about Bipolar Disorder Lasse Raaby Gammelgaard DOI: 10.47788/GRFK1241 10. Seeing Feeling: Dissociation and Post-Traumatic Memory in the Graphic Novel Perfect Hair Penni Russon DOI: 10.47788/WKFD8677 Part III: Literary Instrumentality and Clinical Psychopathology 11. Writing Therapy, Writing Data: Therapeutic Writing as a Methodological and Ethical Approach in Researching Digital Sexual Assault Signe Uldbjerg DOI: 10.47788/SWBN2997 12. A Question of Context: Sites for Cultural Negotiation in Narratives of Manic Depression Megan Milota DOI: 10.47788/LTVE5090 13. Conscripting Dante: History, Anachronism, and the Uses of Literary Precedents in the ‘New’ Diagnosis of Hoarding Disorder David Orr DOI: 10.47788/QYGF1330 14. Opening Up the Discourse of Male Eating Disorders: Personal Experience in German and English Narratives Heike Bartel DOI: 10.47788/FCMM5517 Afterword Lasse Raaby Gammelgaard DOI: 10.47788/IXUD7033 Notes Index

About the Author :
Lasse R. Gammelgaard is associate professor at the Department of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he is co-director of the research group Health, Media and Narrative. He is author of the high school textbook Galskab i litteraturen [Madness in Literature]. His articles appear in Narrative, Style, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui and Journal of Research in Sickness and Society among others.

Review :
What a wonderful goal, to put literature and psychopathology in dialogue, and I can testify as a psychopathologist, to the extraordinary and enriching achievement of that goal. I have prospered from my engagement with the many complex and enlightening ideas in this book. I cannot recommend this book enough. Madness and Literature adds new and important insights to an ongoing conversation. A particular accomplishment of the collection is that it does not only talk interdisciplinary talk but also walks the walk... a rich and thought-provoking volume. Grammelgaard’s assertion that the volume fosters a purposeful dialogue between literary and medicalised understandings of mental illness is convincing. The book is an important contribution that can aid students and scholars in psychiatry in their endeavors to understand mental illness as a meaningful experience.