“Different perceptions of madness in the poetry of Christopher Smart and William Collins” (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘This sad non-identity': John Clare, William Cowper and ‘Madness’
This essay, based on a talk given at the Cowper & Newton Day held at the Cowper & Newton Museum, Olney, on April 23rd 2005, reconsiders popular perceptions of William Cowper and John Clare as ‘mad’ poets, examining the various diagnoses of Clare, introducing some of the biographical sources of these, and making brief comparison with the twentieth-century novelist Philip K. Dick, whose writings like Clare’s reflect the loss of a twin sister in infancy. Some remarks about Cowper’s life and writings follow, comparing the ways the two poets each describe in different ways a ‘mad girl’, a familiar figure in Romantic poetry. The essay tentatively concludes that the sensitivity that left Cowper and Clare vulnerable to mental distress also gifted them with a special alertness to others that made them both socially valued and able in their poetry to respond to the external world with a sensitised authenticity.
Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry: 1825-1855, by Joseph Crawford
Victorian Studies, 2021
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.
“Marginality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century English poetry: Three ‘Mad’ Writers”
Human fascination with the idea of madness has crossed many cultural boundaries, finding its expression in art and literature since earliest times. Indeed, the motif of madness in literature, in its broad sense, is capable of reminding us of a wide corpus of texts from different backgrounds. These include most of the works that were considered models for the Western tradition, and authors like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Tasso, Goethe, Cervantes, Kafka, or Gogol. However, the apparent richness of the canon is revealed as being merely illusionary when we consider that literary madness can be employed as a critical device in different ways. .....
History of Psychiatry, 1990
Pnnted m England l~agued by difficulties in defining mental illness, yet required to impose its diagnoses and treatments on patients, psychiatry has inevitably, throughout its history, come into repeated conflict with the rights of its patients, the interests of their families and with itself. During what Roy Porter has termed 'the long eighteenth century',1 controversies over the alleged abuse of psychiatric authority reached a new pitch. Protests multiplied as, partaking of an eighteenth century 'consumer boom', unregulated private madhouses sprang up in abundance, and threw into sharper relief what had always been an uneasy marriage between the 'expertise' of medical practitioners and lay proprietors, and the needs of the insane and their families. Moreover, as old humoural models receded in the face of new mechanical and iatrochemical interpretations of diseases, diagnostics and the very language of mental illness widened into an acute state of flux. Early eighteenth century physicians observed how over the years of their practices, Melancholy had merged into Vapours, Hyp into Spleen, and thenceforth into further sub-divisions; whilst nervous complaints were themselves acknowledged as attenuated forms of insanity. By mid-century, one common ground between specialists was that madness had never been 'precisely defined' and comprised not one but many species of disorder.' As nervous illness became increasingly fashionable amongst the upper echelons of society, the Augustan moralists drew a fearful picture of a land ruled by the goddess Spleen, where 'each new night dress' spawned 'a new disease' . They denounced 'such Maladies' as mere sham, vanity, pride, delusion, or madness itself and dismissed the mechanical explanations of
2020
The Exegesis and Current Scholarship 165 6.1) Interpreting the Exegesis through a Psychoanalytic Lens 175 6.2) 'Psychosis' at the Surface 176 6.3) Idiosyncratic Language 6.4) Metamorphosis and the Automated Body 184 6.5) PKD-the-Sinthome 189 6.6) Exegesis as 'Psychotic' Text? 7.1) Dyschronia: From 'Psychosis' to Postmodernism via Orthogonal Time 7.2) Orthogonal Time 7.3) Pathologies of Lived Time 7.4) Lacan & 'Psychotic' Time 7.5) Postmodern Time 7.6) Temporal Becoming and Psychopathology 8.1) PKD's Body of Writing 8.2) Networked Text/Networked Bodies 8.3) Cybernetics, Information & Embodiment 8.4) Autopoiesis 8.5) (Dis)embodiment 8.6) 'Becoming-Information' Conclusion 9.1) On the Construction of Mad Knowledge 9.2) Psychosocial Interpretation of Mad Writing 9.3) The 'Foucault/Derrida' Debate Revisited 9.4) The Exegesis of Daniel Paul Schreber 9.5) Madness and Method: On the Possibility of Interpretation Bibliography Appendix 'psychosis'. Lastly, I discuss Lacan's writing in the context of his later preoccupations with James Joyce (1975-76), and I especially focus on Lacan's concept of the Sinthome. Chapter 3 moves on to examine three other readings of Schreber that I argue can be grouped under the banner of modernism. I demonstrate how the works of Louis Sass (2017), Eric, L. Santner (1996) and Friedrich Kittler (1985) all utilise Schreber's Memoirs to identify particular modernist themes. From modern forms of surveillance and mechanisms of self-reflexivity, through to a specific socio-symbolic crisis experienced within fin de siècle Saxon Germany, and finally to marked changes in the structure of writing and language that resulted from modernist forms of media technology, Schreber's text will be shown to channel modernist themes in both form and content. It is through Freud and these later theorists of modernism that I show the psychosocial nature of Schreber's text. Chapter 4 closes Part 1 of this thesis. I engage with the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1972), in particular those aspects of their theoretical output taken from examples of 'psychotic' text (for example, the writing of Schreber), to offer an alternative theoretical framework for reading mad writing. Deleuze and Guattari's 'schizoanalysis' provides an important counter to 17 This quote is taken from the online article entitled Cogito, Madness & Religion. Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan which can be found at: https://www.lacan.com/zizforest.html. Žižek further argues in this that "madness is inscribed into the history of Cogito at two levels. First, throughout the entire philosophy of subjectivity from Descartes through Kant, Schelling and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Husserl, Cogito is related to its shadowy double, pharmakon, which is madness. Second, madness is inscribed into the very (pre)history of Cogito itself, it is part of its transcendental genesis".
CONSCIOUSNESS TO DISSOLUTION: THE INSANE PRODIGIES OF SHAKESPEARE
New Academia, 2014
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey vision they obtain glimpses of eternity.... They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the "light affable” (Poe 1). The belief that insanity is linked with creative thinking or scholarship, has been held since ancient times. It is a widely popular notion. "Deviant behavior, whether in the form of eccentricity or worse, is not only associated with persons of genius or high-level creativity, but it is frequently expected of them"(Rothenberg 149). Since the time of the Greek philosophers, those who wrote about the creative process emphasized that creativity involves a regression to more primitive mental processes, that to be creative requires a willingness to cross and re-cross the lines between rational and irrational thought. What is the evidence that there is a link between creativity, scholarship and madness? What account can be given for this link, biologically and psychologically? And what does this association suggest for related research and our understanding of creative and insightful people? To look into these queries, I intend to review the journeys of William Shakespeare‟s preposterous scholars, Hamlet and King Lear from consciousness to dissolution. These two heroes have consistently intrigued scholars. The two prodigies point to deeper and more intricate questions of identity and human predicaments than are presented on stage. The question of their madness has been the center of the interpretation of the two plays. Seneca recorded Aristotle as having said, "No great genius was without a mixture of insanity”(quoted in Langsdorf 90).