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9 books about Mental illness in literature
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Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure
Jeffrey Berman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Library of Congress RC569.5.S48B47 2007 | Dewey Decimal 616.8582
Cutting, a form of self-mutilation, is a growing problem in the United States, especially among adolescent females. It is regarded as self-destructive behavior, yet paradoxically, people who cut themselves generally do not wish to die but to find relief from unbearable psychological pain.
Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure is the first book to explore how college students write about their experiences as cutters. The idea behind the book arose when Patricia Hatch Wallace, a high school English teacher, wrote a reader-response diary for a graduate course taught by Professor Jeffrey Berman in which she revealed for the first time that she had cut herself twenty years earlier. At Berman's suggestion, Wallace wrote her Master's thesis on cutting. Not long after she finished her thesis, two students in Berman's expository writing course revealed their own experiences as cutters. Their disclosures encouraged several students in another writing class to share their own cutting stories with classmates. Realizing that so many students were writing about the same phenomenon, Berman and Wallace decided to write a book about a subject that is rarely discussed inside or outside the classroom.
In Part 1, Wallace discusses clinical and theoretical aspects of cutting and then applies these insights to several memoirs and novels, including Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Caroline Kettlewell's Skin Game, and Patricia McCormick's Cut. The motivation behind Wallace's research was the desire to learn more about herself, and she reads these stories through her own experience as a cutter. In Part 2, Berman focuses on the pedagogical dynamics of cutting: how undergraduate students write about cutting, how their writings affect classmates and teachers, and how students who cut themselves can educate everyone in the classroom about a problem that has personal, psychological, cultural, and educational significance.
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Dionysus in Literature: Essays on Literary Madness
Edited by Branimir M. Rieger
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
Library of Congress PN56.M45D56 1994 | Dewey Decimal 809.93353
In this anthology, outstanding authorities present their assessments of literary madness in a variety of topics and approaches. The entire collection of essays presents intriguing aspects of the Dionysian element in literature.
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Dramatizing Dementia: Madness In The Plays Of Tennessee Williams
Jacqueline O'Connor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Library of Congress PS3545.I5365Z795 1997 | Dewey Decimal 812.54
Jacqueline O’Connor examines how Tennessee Williams portrayed society’s treatment of the mentally ill. The critical approach is eclectic and the author draws on a variety of psychological, literary, and biographical sources.
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Madness, Language, Literature
Michel Foucault
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Library of Congress PN56.M45F68 2023 | Dewey Decimal 801.95
Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.
Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.
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Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833
Gary Rosenshield
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
Library of Congress PG3358.M45R67 2003 | Dewey Decimal 891.713
In 1833 Alexander Pushkin began to explore the topic of madness, a subject little explored in Russian literature before his time. The works he produced on the theme are three of his greatest masterpieces: the prose novella The Queen of Spades, the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, and the lyric "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind." Gary Rosenshield presents a new interpretation of Pushkin’s genius through an examination of his various representations of madness.
Pushkin brilliantly explored both the destructive and creative sides of madness, a strange fusion of violence and insight. In this study, Rosenshield illustrates the surprising valorization of madness in The Queen of Spades and "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind" and analyzes The Bronze Horseman’s confrontation with the legacy of Peter the Great, a cornerstone figure of Russian history. Drawing on themes of madness in western literature, Rosenshield situates Pushkin in a greater framework with such luminaries as Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky providing an insightful and absorbing study of Russia’s greatest writer.
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Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature
Allen Thiher
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Library of Congress PN56.M45T53 1999 | Dewey Decimal 809.93353
"Fascinating and important . . . a work of prodigious scholarship, covering the entire history of Western thought and treating both literary and medical discourses with subtlety and verve."
---Louis Sass, author of Madness and Modernism
"The scope of this book is daunting, ranging from madness in the ancient Greco-Roman world, to Christianized concepts of medieval folly, through the writings of early modern authors such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Descartes, and on to German Romantic philosophy, fin de siècle French poetry, and Freud . . . Artaud, Duras, and Plath."
---Isis
"This provocative and closely argued work will reward many readers."
---Choice
In Revels in Madness, Allen Thiher surveys a remarkable range of writers as he shows how conceptions of madness in literature have reflected the cultural assumptions of their era. Thiher underscores the transition from classical to modern theories of madness-a transition that began at the end of the Enlightenment and culminates in recent women's writing that challenges the postmodern understanding of madness as a fall from language or as a dysfunction of culture.
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Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
Lawrence R. Broer
University of Alabama Press, 1994
Library of Congress PS3572.O5Z55 1994 | Dewey Decimal 813.54
In this revised edition of a volume originally published in 1989, Lawrence Broer extends his comprehensive critique of the body of writing by Kurt Vonnegut. Broer offers a broad psychoanalytic study of Vonnegut’s works from Player Piano to Hocus Pocus, taking a decisively new approach to the work of one of America’s most important, yet often misinterpreted writers. A compelling and original analysis, Sanity Plea, explores how Vonnegut incorporates his personal experiences into an art that is not defeatist, but rather creatively therapeutic and life-affirming.
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The Terrible Fitzball: The Melodramatist of the Macabre
Larry Stephen Clifton
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993
Library of Congress PR4699.F9Z55 1993
The greatest portrayer of blue-fire deviltry, Edward Fitzball was a melodramatist on the nineteenth-century British stage. His Theatre of the Macabre was very much a forebearer of the sensationalized media of today. This book discusses Fitzball’s life, and his dramatic oeuvre.
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The Twisted Mind: Madness In Melville'S Fiction
Paul Mccarthy
University of Iowa Press, 1990
Library of Congress PS2388.M45M38 1990 | Dewey Decimal 813.3
Madness in Herman Melville's Fiction
Paul McCarthy
"Though madness has been a consistent topic in considerations of Melville's work, this is the first full-scale treatment of the subject. It is in a sense, then, a pioneering work that will no doubt receive widespread attention."
—William B. Dillingham
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