This thesis looks at the changing status of madness in French psychiatric and literary culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, considering the ways in which shifting interpretations of this phenomenon were inseparable from the specificities of this precise historical and ideological context. The work of Gérard de Nerval, in particular Les Illuminés (1852), is central to the thesis. The early decades of nineteenth-century France saw a revolutionary transformation in the understanding of the concept of madness, reflecting the broad ideological changes wrought by Enlightenment philosophy and the 1789 Revolution. Part One examines the appropriation of the study and treatment of madness by the newly emergent psychiatric profession, considering the way in which age-old religious and supernatural interpretations of madness were now replaced by the pathologising discourse of medical science. Whilst the study of mental abnormalities had previously been considered the prerogative of the Church, religion in this period became identified as both a cause and a symptom of madness, and this thesis studies the emergence of the controversial diagnostic category of religious madness. The early psychiatric concept of religious madness was two-fold: either excessive religious sentiment was perceived as the cause of mental alienation; or pathological religiosity was interpreted as a symptom of madness. On the one hand, the idea, central to early psychiatry, that imbalanced passions were the primary source of mental illness, implied that the emotive dimension of religious experience was a major cause of madness. At the same time, apparently visionary and mystical experience was increasingly interpreted as pathological hallucination and considered symptomatic of mental illness, leading to the highly controversial psychiatric practice of “retrospective medicine”, which involved reinterpreting the visions of influential historical and religious figures. This section of the thesis also looks at the identification of multiple forms of partial madness, in particular the distinctly nineteenth-century concepts of monomania and eccentricity, considering the way in which the latter concept, besides gaining a pathological dimension, became bound up, in both medical and Romantic writings, with enhanced creative and intellectual capacities. Part One closes with a consideration of these themes within the general writings of Gérard de Nerval, examining the way in which he evokes his own diagnosis with madness, especially the subcategories of religious madness, or monomania, theomania and demonomania, in his writings. It looks, in particular, at the theme of religious madness within his semi-autobiographical Aurélia (1855), and how the narrative of this text oscillates between medical and metaphysical discourse relating to religious madness, while never explicitly identifying with either ideological perspective. Part Two focuses specifically upon Nerval’s Les Illuminés, a collection of portraits of historical visionaries and madmen, associated, to varying degrees, with mystical and esoteric belief systems. The theme of religious madness is central to this work, which depicts ambiguous phenomena, such as hallucination, prophetical vision, and dream, which were increasingly analysed from a scientific perspective in psychiatric writings, but which continued to elicit religious and mystical interpretations. Nerval’s narrative simultaneously embraces and rejects contemporaneous psychiatric ideas in relation to these themes. In the preface to Les Illuminés, Nerval’s narrator twice describes his subjects as “excentriques”, and the present thesis considers how the six portraits contained within this text reflect contemporaneous popular and psychiatric ideas relating to this newly emergent nineteenth-century concept. Exploiting the inherent ambiguity of eccentricity, Nerval attaches both a positive and negative dimension to his subjects, fusing pathologising discourse with suggestions of privileged mystical vision, enhanced creativity, and even genius. In Les Illuminés, Nerval portrays various states of madness and eccentricity in a distinctly ambivalent manner, mediating between medical, Romantic, and mystical perspectives of madness, and depriving the reader of a stable authorial perspective. This thesis shows that, if the subjects of Les Illuminés cannot be described as illuminés in any conventional, historical sense of the term, in relation to the eighteenth-century Illuminist movement, they nevertheless adhere to a later definition to the term, which appeared in dictionaries from the middle of the nineteenth century, and which is concerned with the impassioned pursuit of irrational and illusory phenomena. This thesis offers a fresh reading of Nerval’s Les Illuminés in light of nineteenthcentury psychiatric writings regarding madness, monomania, and eccentricity, particularly in relation to deviant or excessive religious and mystical beliefs.

Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, explores representations of gender and madness through her male as well as her female characters. Through the use of a psychological and postcolonial framework – specifically based on the works of Melanie Klein, Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin – Atwood’s representations come to signify the relationship between self and society in such a way as to show the connection between identity, power, powerless and the definition of madness in society. While many critics have explored Atwood’s representation of identity in relation to gender, an exploration of representations of gender in relation to madness has been mostly overlooked. Atwood explicitly links the concept of ‘powerlessness’ to madness; madness can be seen (by Foucault and other members of the antipsychiatric tradition) as being essentially constructed and controlled by the intellectual and cultural forces that operate within society, connecting one who is ‘powerless’ to one who is ‘mad’. As well as this relationship, the connection between postcolonial theory and psychology that suggests that Western psychology, specifically psychoanalysis, in its denial of the political influence on the psyche, denies the postcolonial subject the space in which to identify with his or her community. While Atwood’s novels show an interest in human curiosity, they also represent notions of control and power in a way that makes the reader appreciate the relationship between self and society and how this relationship is related to identity formation.

No description available.

No description available.

The thesis begins with the book History of Madness in the Classical Age of the noteworthy debate revolving around the two thinkers, Foucault and Derrida, and then embarks on the inquiry of Foucault¡¦s archeological methodology from two aspects. First, Cartesian Meditations presents the individual differences between the two thinkers¡¦ methodologies on the one hand, and it raises different viewpoints concerning the privileges of dream and madness on the other. Second, the debate in this sense is made to employ Derrida¡¦s comment as an angle of rereading Foucault, which serves to offer an attempt to renew Foucault¡¦s textual reading and conduct a methodological inquiry. Both dream and madness are the main thread of the thesis. Along with the two threads and Foucault¡¦s textual exposition, we are allowed to discover that the Classical Age offers a discursive practice between the visibility and the enunciability. Due to the discourse and language in reason and subjectivity embedded in the philosophical thought, which then obtains their priority, I aim to further strengthen the argument that Foucault¡¦s archeological work does not merely rely on the dimensions of discourse and language. Instead, it suggests de facto the transferring of moving toward the image and figure.

This thesis interrogates the interaction between feminist utopianism and altered states of consciousness in fiction from 1970 onwards. The thesis develops further both Lyman Tower Sargent's definition of utopianism as "social dreaming" and Tom Moylan's understanding of critical utopia. It also develops and expands Lucy Sargisson's definition of feminist utopianism as subversive, fluid, ambiguous and committed to ongoing personal and social transformation. Utopianism must challenge society's norms and values, offering both social critique and social vision. I argue throughout this work that transforming individual consciousness is a vital step towards social change. The thesis focuses on four altered states of consciousness: madness, dreaming, spirituality and telepathy. These states are situated within a theoretical context, and are then explicated further through close literary analysis of feminist utopian literature. Altered states offer a metaphor for the need to think differently, and highlight the importance of looking at society in new and alternative ways. In a significant number of feminist utopian texts, utopia is accessed through a dream or a vision, through spiritual meditation, telepathy, or a state of "madness". Within these texts, altered states are not only used as a means of accessing utopia but are also represented within the narrative as a means of maintaining or sustaining the utopian vision. Additionally, I show that altered states refers to the place of utopia, which is altered, or different to, contemporary society. The reader may also enter into an altered state through the process of reading the text, as their beliefs and assumptions about "the way things are" are challenged, denaturalised and subverted.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Newly single and working the graveyard-shift at his local railway station, Peter Lawson is a complete failure. Yet, inexplicably, he has never felt better in his life. This confidence swells when a newsreader on morning television and an astrologer at the city’s loudest tabloid both agree: Peter is 'The One'... What follows next tests the limits of his mind, and his faith, as he lurches from crisis to catastrophe – being helped along in his journey by a psychiatrist, a priest, and a class full of autistic boys – before meeting Maya, the woman who guides him home. Set between Sydney, London, and the foothills of the Himalayas, 'The Triumphant Approach' is a tale about love, lunacy and the attraction of belief: a meditation on identity, and the redemptive power of losing one’s mind, in modern day Australia. Following the novel is a critical exegesis that charts the genesis and development of The Triumphant Approach by examining its various thematic elements with a focus on madness and writing, giving particular attention to the mental illness and spirituality shared by the protagonist and the author. The exegesis examines how identity is changed by mental illness and explores the inherent challenges for the writer intent on expressing that through fiction, as well as looking at the relationship between mental illness and belief – with a view to understanding the symbiotic relationship between the two.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Newly single and working the graveyard-shift at his local railway station, Peter Lawson is a complete failure. Yet, inexplicably, he has never felt better in his life. This confidence swells when a newsreader on morning television and an astrologer at the city’s loudest tabloid both agree: Peter is 'The One'... What follows next tests the limits of his mind, and his faith, as he lurches from crisis to catastrophe – being helped along in his journey by a psychiatrist, a priest, and a class full of autistic boys – before meeting Maya, the woman who guides him home. Set between Sydney, London, and the foothills of the Himalayas, 'The Triumphant Approach' is a tale about love, lunacy and the attraction of belief: a meditation on identity, and the redemptive power of losing one’s mind, in modern day Australia. Following the novel is a critical exegesis that charts the genesis and development of The Triumphant Approach by examining its various thematic elements with a focus on madness and writing, giving particular attention to the mental illness and spirituality shared by the protagonist and the author. The exegesis examines how identity is changed by mental illness and explores the inherent challenges for the writer intent on expressing that through fiction, as well as looking at the relationship between mental illness and belief – with a view to understanding the symbiotic relationship between the two.

Fiction and drama have engaged with madness across the epistemes of the American twentieth century. Given the prominence of the subject of madness, both historically and literarily, we need a unified methodology for analysis and action. As a subfield of disability studies, "mad studies" deals specifically with representations of mental distress rather than physical otherness, examining how "madness" enables writers to convey certain meanings or produce certain stories. In minor characters, these meanings are infused into characters' actantial function within the symbolic model of disability: madness works as a device for plot, psychological depth (of other characters), and thematic resonance. Onstage, these meanings transform as they inhabit the social/political/cultural model of disability rather than the medical or symbolic models. Realistic, expressionistic, and musical theatre across the twentieth century have all found ways to stage not only "madness," but also the social responses and contexts that construct it, while simultaneously giving audiences formal opportunities to sympathize with the so-called mad characters. Mad protagonists follow particular plot patterns prompted by the temporal, existential, or hermeneutic mystery posed by madness. Male madness narratives often engage with the legitimizing etiology of war, freeing them from the temporal mystery - "what caused this to happen?" - and allowing them to address the existential mystery - "what is this like?" - through formal experimentation. Female madness narratives, grappling with a medical discourse that emphasizes endogenous causality for women, retort to such discourse by emphasizing a broader temporal plot. Offering more possible answers to "what caused this to happen" than doctors do, female madness narratives show that subjective experience exists within a social, as well as a biological, framework. Yet, popular as fictions remain, in recent years, the genre of memoir has eclipsed them. Madness memoir engages in a real-world context with the central linguistic challenge of madness. Memoirists' use of metaphor to convey recalcitrant experiences of distress not only engages with existential and hermeneutic mystery (what is it like, and what does it mean), but suggests a way forward for intersubjective understanding that sympathizes without co-opting, allowing for meaningful communication and political action across differences.

Nesta tese desenvolve-se o conceito literatura da urgência para definir o tipo de escrita realizado sob estados de emergência, situações-limite: no caso específico de Lima Barreto, serve de base para a análise do Diário do hospício produzido pelo autor em 1919-20, quando esteve internado no hospício Pedro II, no Rio de Janeiro. Demonstra-se como esta literatura nasceu conspurcada, contaminada pela loucura e pela rotina no manicômio, sendo simultaneamente uma escrita de si (conceito de Foucault) criada para defender o eu acuado ante a instituição e um documento de valor histórico capaz de denunciar, pelo viés do paciente, minúcias do dia-a-dia psiquiátrico normalmente ausentes da literatura oficial do hospício. Desvela-se ainda como esta urgência contagiou outros escritos de Lima Barreto, tornando-o autor de uma literatura-alforria que transgrediu códigos e esgarçou limites entre vida e obra, pele branca e negra, pobreza e riqueza, ignorância e cultura, literatura popular e erudita, lucidez e loucura. / This thesis develops the concept literature of urgency to define a type of writing produced in some kind of emergency, in situations that are really close to the edge: in Lima Barretos specific case this is the basis to the analysis of Diário do hospício (Hospices diary) written by the author in 1919-20, while he was a patient in the psychiatric hospital Pedro II, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It demonstrates how this literature has appeared already contaminated by insanity and by the hospitals routine, constituting simultaneously a self-writting (lécriture de soi, a Foucaults concept) created to defend a trapped ego dealing with the institution and a document of historical value that accuses, from de the patients point of view, details of the psychiatric routine normally absent from the hospices official literature. This thesis shows how this urgency has contaminated other Barretos writings, contributing to make him the author of a literature-liberation which violated codes and enlarged the limits between life and work, white and black skin, poverty and wealth, ignorance and culture, popular and scholar literature, lucidity and insanity.