English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Psychology & Literature, 19th Century French Literature - Literary Criticism

Lucid Interval

Name: Lucid Interval
Author: George MacLennan
ISBN: 9780838635056

by George MacLennan

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Overview

Throughout history a number of writers have given utterance to their own extreme experiences of mental breakdown and madness. In a chronological study that ranges in time and place from medieval England and renaissance Italy to nineteenth-century France, George MacLennan examines the work of eight such writers, poets, or autobiographers, both well known and obscure: Thomas Hoccleve, Torquato Tasso, James Carkesse, John Bunyan, George Trosse, William Cowper, John Clare, and Gerard de Nerval. Michael Foucault once asked the tantilizing (sic) question, "How can language apply a single and identical discourse to poetry and madness?" Lucid Interval concerns itself with this question, broaching it in its cultural and historical dimensions and broadening its terms of reference to include the relationship between subjective writing, literature, and madness. While it is primarily concerned with modes of literary writing, this study draws on a growing body of research into the history of madness and its treatment, addressing topics in the fields of psychoanalytic theory as well as religious, social, and medical history. In recent years the topic of madness has received an increasing amount of attention from critics and historians. As one historian has complained, however, the experience of madness itself remains exiled to the margins of knowledge. No less importantly, no study yet seriously addressed the phenomenon to which Foucault drew attention in the early 1960s, namely the emergence in Western culture of a subjective literature of madness. This study seeks to comprehend the voices of those exponents of inner crisis and of madness who have expressed themselves in writing. It further considers the cultural conditions under which their discourses, in certain significant instances, acquire the status of "literature." MacLennan approaches the eight writers from a broadly sociohistorical viewpoint and takes into account relevant biographical and medical evidence, where av