Catalogue

Based on public lectures delivered by an impressive array of scholars working across the sciences and humanities, these essays examine links between the creative process and mental illness, from the medieval world to the modern. Interdisciplinarity is the volume's greatest strength; the contributors draw insights from medicine, literature, theology, and philosophy as they consider such writers as Blake, Cowper, Wordsworth, Mann, and Berryman. The essays "span the interrelated subjects of the mind, specifically the state of 'madness' or mental illness; medicine, in particular attitudes to and experience of mental illness; and literature, both as representing the experience of madness and cultural responses to it." Along the way, the essays strike a balance between romantic notions of madness, which see mental illness as a necessary precursor of creative genius, and a realistic account of the sufferings of the creative mind, a viewpoint that raises the possibility that disordered thinking may be "the enemy of great art." This volume complements and expands on such recent treatments of madness as Carol Thomas Neely's Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (CH, Dec'04, 42-2069). ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. D. Pesta Oklahoma State University