Lucid Interval: Subjective Writing and Madness in History"MacLennan approaches the eight writers from a broadly sociohistorical viewpoint and takes into account relevant biographical and medical evidence, where available, examining their situations as revealed or mediated by their writings. Through a series of detailed analyses, he argues that these writings bear witness to a progressively increasing degree of psychological inwardness in Western culture. This is a process that affects both how madness is experienced by the individual and how it is expressed in subjective writing. By the late eighteenth century, madness becomes, for a significant number of writers and artists, an intimately interiorized condition, one which implicates their entire affective life. It is this subjectivized and "existential" madness that, in the Romantic period and subsequently, has been taken to express an "inner truth" in an increasingly secularized and alienating state of society." "In taking these developments into account, Lucid Interval is able to arrive at a fresh understanding of the appearance in the modern period of such figures as Clare and de Nerval--writers who suffer madness as an inner, subjective catastrophe but who, in the midst of that experience, are able to explore it creatively, so producing a "literature of madness," which is a new phenomenon in itself and which sets a troubling precedent for modern culture."--BOOK JACKET. |
Contents
The Poet as Madman | 15 |
The Madman as Poet | 39 |
The Pathology of Puritanism | 55 |
The Privatisation of Madness | 78 |
The Poet on the Couch | 96 |
Literature has destroyed my head | 120 |
Romanticism Medicine | 153 |
Madness tells her story | 177 |
Notes | 196 |
| 214 | |
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Common terms and phrases
alienation associationism asylum Aurélia autobiographical becomes Bethlem Blanche bourgeois Bunyan Byron Carkesse Carkesse's Child Harold childhood Christopher Hill Cited concerns condition conscience context contrast Cowper crisis culture discourse of identity doctor domestic Don Juan dream eighteenth century environment experience of madness father Foucault George Trosse Gérard Gérard de Nerval hallucinatory Helpston historical Hoccleve Hölderlin Ibid iden inner insane interior interiorised introspective JCAW John Clare Labrunie language literal literary literature LPJC Lucida intervalla lyric madhouse madman Mary maternal meaning melancholy Memoir mental metaphor Michel Foucault mode moral treatment mother narrative narrator Nerval Nevertheless norms Northborough notion Otloh of St pathological Pléiade poem poet poet's poetic poetry possession private sphere prose provides psychical psychological Puritan reality reason recovery reference relationship religious Romantic scene seems sense sestet situation social sofa sonnet spiritual subjective Tasso theomania therapeutic tion Trosse Trosse's vision visionary voice William Cowper writing wrote