This thesis demonstrates that the historic silencing of those labelled ‘mad’ is – paradoxically – inextricable from language. Stigma is a semantic issue. The focus of my first chapter is to establish how and when the language available to discuss ‘madness’ became so problematic. Chapter one establishes a dual language problem: first, the language which surrounds ‘madness’ is limited and limiting; second, this language imposes social ‘otherness’, often permanently. I approach the politics of the language of ‘madness’ using Saussure’s hypothesis of signification, Lacan’s theory of the nom du père, and narrative theory, in order to investigate who is to blame when language and narratives fail. In chapter two, I examine the reality of these semantic and narrative politics. This chapter covers a variety of ‘madness’ narratives salvaged from psychiatric textbooks, for example those of influential psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler and Sigmund Freud. Such texts have been essential to the development of psychiatry, but how have these discourses about ‘madness’ functioned to establish stigma? I retrieve personal accounts from these hegemonic publications, establishing how the presence of paratexts and psychiatric ‘authority’ manipulate the receipt of such narratives. This will demonstrate how the historic silencing of ‘madness’ began. Chapter three focuses on how a cross section of nineteenth-century fiction portrays ‘madness’, in order to explore the potential for fiction to offer ‘madness’ an accessible narrative platform. Initially, I examine literature as a continuation of psychiatric discourse, including Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’; Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Maud’; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. As a point of comparison, I examine literary representations which go beyond psychiatric discourse to articulate ‘madness’, exploring Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’; and texts which explore other selves and other worlds (Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’; and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass). Chapter four examines the merits of visual art as a platform for ‘madness’ narratives, as it is divorced from many of the issues which are latent in language use. I explore the oeuvres of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists Richard Dadd, Vincent Van Gogh, Louis Wain, Adolf Wölfli, August Klett, and Hyacinth Freiherr von Wieser. Despite the theoretical assumption that visual art is universal and accessible, the social reception of art, necessary for this communication to be heard and validated, proves that the practice is far removed from this hypothesis. The stereotype of the ‘mad’ artist is, in itself, an oxymoron: in the realm of social engagement, either the artistic identity of the individual is compromised and eventually disparaged, or ‘madness’ is obscured and censored. Chapter five shows how the nineteenth-century model for (mis)understanding ‘madness’ is the foundation for our twenty-first-century discourse. This chapter examines narratives of ‘madness’ in popular culture, to understand how these discourses echo or challenge psychiatric representations of ‘madness’, and how a mainstream social audience is encouraged to feel about such depictions, including episodes The Simpsons, House and Peep Show, to explore how psychiatric discourse has shaped these narratives. This chapter also scrutinises the language employed by the media and other mainstream agencies in order to establish what these popular discourses reveal about entrenched societal prejudices and fear. This thesis addresses the question: can we truly ever speak of ‘madness’ without simultaneously silencing it?

Pacifique is a novel of trauma and recovery set in contemporary Victoria, British Columbia. Tia, the protagonist, meets Pacifique one cold February evening. Five sex- and passion-fueled nights later, a bike ride ends with Tia's head colliding with concrete. When she wakes, Pacifique is gone. Worse, it's unclear whether Pacifique ever existed in the first place. Driven mad in the search for a woman who may be a figment of her imagination, Tia is institutionalized in a psychiatric ward. The doctors tell her she is suffering from head-injury induced psychosis; her fellow patients—including Andrew, a man with schizophrenia—urge her to forget Pacifique. Told in chapters alternating between Tia's and Andrew's points of view, the novel keeps readers asking: is Pacifique real? The novel examines notions of credibility and truth: whom to believe? The medical establishment or the “patients”? The novel also examines how behaviour outside the heteronormative—particularly “obsessive” behaviour or “fantasies”—are pathologized in our culture. Fundamentally, the novel is a story about the thin veil between fantasy and reality, about the choices we make to be happy—and how these choices cannot always coexist. Inspired by Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Holly Luhning’s Quiver and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Pacifique can be situated within the psychological thriller genre in the way it plays with the notion of reality and alternate realities.

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This thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part establishes the theoretical framework that served as a guide for my English translation of the short novel La débil mental by Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz, and consists of three chapters. Due to the novel’s narrative style and subject matter, my translation approach was centered on the topic of female madness in literature. Therefore, the first chapter examines feminist theories of translation and their relevance to the project at hand. The second examines the topic of madness in literature, and pays particular attention to depictions of women with mental illnesses in literary works. Then, in the third chapter, I will attempt to draw on the previous two chapters to develop an approach to translating female madness, and examine specific choices made in my translation of La débil mental in that light. Finally, the second main part of the thesis consists of my translation of the novel.

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This thesis offers a comparative analysis of the poetic identities of Christopher Smart (1722-71), William Cowper (1731-1800) and William Blake (1757) in the context of contemporary understandings of madness and changing ideas of personal and spiritual identity from c.1750-1820. Critical attention is focused on the chameleonic status of madness in its various manifestations, of which melancholy, particularly in its religious guise, is particularly important. This thesis adopts an historicist approach that emphasizes poetic voice, and registers a close analysis of the arguments and diction employed in poetry, prose and medical writing associated with eighteenth-century madness. Rather than assuming a pathological status for these poets, I have paid close attention to the way in which madness is represented in the work itself and drawn contrasts with significant contemporary ideas in influential medical discourse. The thesis looks at key long poems including Smart's Jubilate Agno (written c.1758-63), Cowper's series of moral satires in Poems (1782), and Blake's The Four Zoas (written c.1797-1807), as well as some prose writing and letters, all of which contend with issues that underlie the public and medical scrutiny of madness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the line between madness and strong religious convictions; the relationship between the body and the soul; anxieties about the social order and the national character; and a burgeoning individualism. The argument is attentive to the importance of language in medicine as well as poetry, and analyses the diction employed by several eighteenth century mad-doctors, most notably the St. Luke's physician, William Battie (1703-1776); the cleric, physician, and poet, Nathaniel Cotton (1707-1788); and the controversial Bethlem apothecary and prolific medical writer, John Haslam (1764-1844). Although historically grounded, the thesis makes connections between the eighteenth-century culture of madness and contemporary understandings of mental disturbance.

This dissertation investigates the cultural, ideological, and literary background of and assumptions underpinning interpretations and representations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in nineteenth-century Britain. Ophelia was a fundamental image in Victorian iconography, and was appropriated for and implicated in historically embedded social, cultural, and psychological formations and subjected to new methods of critical scrutiny. In art, poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and medical discourse, Ophelia became an example of feminine purity and tenderness, a prototype of Victorian female insanity, and a model for representations of beautiful, drowning women. Drawing on New Historicist theories and methodologies, I use fictional and non-fictional writing from literary, medical, and social discourses in order to elucidate an understanding of the dynamic and compelling relationship between the Victorian period and this fictional Shakespearean character.

Discourse on madness is ubiquitous in world cultures. The behaviors, beliefs, and experiences that come to be labeled as madness vary according to context, and the language used to identify and describe these behaviors, beliefs, and experiences also varies significantly. Though there is great diversity of interpretation, it is nevertheless the case that madness—however contextually defined—is a universal human category within discourses on behavior and experience. Employing the method of discourse comparison, this dissertation works toward developing a model of the discourse on madness in India by developing a meta-linguistic vocabulary for describing positions within the discourse. Two collections of sources are compared: selections from classical Sanskrit literature and a body of interviews, pamphlets, and conference recordings from 2012-2013 India. The analytical focus is on how attributions of madness are made—through which words and levels of discourse, and due to what kinds of affiliations or motivations, political, social, religious or otherwise. Each of the six chapters, with the exception of Chapter 1 on constructions of “health” and “normalcy,” addresses a different “sphere of concern” that arises when people are confronted with behavior they interpret as madness: defining madness (Chapter 2), creating madness (Chapter 3), legislating madness (Chapter 4), curing madness (Chapter 5), and aspiring to madness (Chapter 6). In analyzing the materials in these chapters from a comparative perspective, I identify “sub-discourses”—increasingly specific discourses on madness within the “spheres of concern”—and also “spectrums of interpretation”—spectrums of positions found within the discourse on madness. In organizing the discourse into these categories, we can compare positions on madness at various levels of specificity within and across cultures. Ultimately, the goal is to better understand, and more systematically compare, how people from different times and places have imagined, described, and managed madness—operationally defined here as pathologized deviant behavior—in both similar and unique ways. / text

Although a variety of approaches have been adopted to researching creativity, the phenomenology of creativity has not been well-represented in the literature. This constitutes a significant obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, satisfactory model of the creative process. The current thesis aimed to provide a systematic analysis of the phenomenology of artistic creativity. The thesis also attempted to integrate the analysis of phenomenological aspects of artistic creativity with the more established approaches of creativity-personality and creativity-psychopathology research. Specifically, the research investigated whether the phenomenology of artistic creativity varies in relation to features of personality and psychopathology.

This thesis questions how theatre can act as a site of resistance against the political structures of madness. It analyzes a variety of plays from the past 25 years of British and Irish theatre in order to discern what modes of resistance are possible, and the conceptual lines upon which they follow. It questions how these modes of resistance are imbibed in the representation of madness. It discerns what way these modes relate specifically to the theatrical, and what it is the theatrical specifically has to offer these conceptualizations. It achieves this through a close textual and performative analysis of the selected plays, interrogating these plays from various theoretical perspectives. It follows and explores different conceptualizations across both political and ethical lay lines, looking at what composes the theatrical practical critique, how theatre can alter and play with space, how theatre capacitate the act of witnessing, and the possibility of re-invigorating the ethical encounter through theatrical means. It achieves this through a critical engagement with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Engaging with the heterogeneity of madness, it covers a variety of madness’s different attributes and logics, including: the constitution and institutional structures of the contemporary asylum; the cultural idioms behind hallucination; the means by which suicide is apprehended and approached; how testimony of the mad person is interpreted and encountered.