Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism

Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards.

Expands literature's contribution to the medical humanities Analyzes the function of symptoms in representing madness in literature Discusses debates regarding approaches to mental health

Autorentext

Nicolas Pierre Boileau is Senior Lecturer at the Aix-Marseille University, France.

Klappentext

The Function of Symptoms in British Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards.

Inhalt
1 The Function of Symptoms of 'Mental Health': How Literature Is Situated in the Debate Between Cure and Care.-Part I Doctors' Misdiagnoses: Symptoms, Meaning and Function.-2 Symptomatic Silence: Situating the Subject in Mrs Dalloway.-3 Meaning and Interpretation: The Failure of the Psychiatric Method in Asylum by Patrick McGrath.-4 From Physical Symptoms to Subjective Creations in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy.-Part II The Symptom and the Body: Discreet Signs of Psychological Disorders.-5 The Body as Dangerous Jouissance in The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing.-6 AIDS, Manic-Depression and the Symptoms of the 1980s in The Line of Beauty.-Part III Voices, Contemporary Symptoms and SocialCohesion.-7 Voices, Silence and the Body: Cusk's Modernist Explorations of Symptomatic Encounters in the OutlineTrilogy (20142018).-8 Ali Smith's Voices: Everyone Is Delirious