Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction: Figuring Madness

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 1-22

3. ‘Unheard-of Contradictions’: The Language of Madness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 23-40

4. ‘Running Mad’: Loco-Motion and the Madness of Language in Jane Austen’s ‘Love and Friendship’

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 41-62

5. The Body Melancholy: Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 63-96

6. The Suffocation of The Mother: Hysteria and Heart and Science

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 97-107

7. The Silent ‘Horrors’ of The Turn of The Screw and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Revisited

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 108-138

8. Subjects at Sea: The Paranoiac Knowledge of Moby-Dick

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 139-184

9. Epilogue: Dia-gnosis

   • Chris Wiesenthal

   Pages 185-189

10. Back Matter

    Pages 190-202

    PDF

How are signs and symptoms of psychic alienation variously enfigured in literary texts? And how do readers invariably figure in some form of the 'madness' they attempt to figure out? These are some of the questions addressed by Figuring Madness , a study which employs the insights of current post-structuralist psychoanalysis and semiotic theory to examine the complex interimplication of the subject and object of madness that is always implied by the dynamics of analytic dia-gnosis. In its focus on the implications of writing and reading signs of madness, the study offers new interpretations of both canonical and non-canonical texts by authors spanning the period from Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James.

• Anthony Trollope
• fiction
• Henry James
• Jane Austen
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

  Chris Wiesenthal

CHRIS WIESENTHAL

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