| Description |
xiv, 145 pages ; 23 cm |
| Series |
Palgrave pivot |
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Palgrave pivot.
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| Contents |
PART I: "COULD IT BE MADNESS, THIS?" AFFECTIVE DIFFERENCE AND THE WORK OF COMPOSITION -- 1. 'What Ceremony of Words Can Patch the Havoc?': Composition and madness / Stephanie Stone Horton -- 2. Muse Afire: Negotiating the Line Between Creative Pursuit and Mental Illness / Nancer Ballard -- 3. After the Fire Goes Out: Writing Before and After Treatment for Affective Disorder / Lise Bagoley -- 4. Gaps on the Vita / Sharon O'Brien -- 5. Lunatic / Jeannie Parker Beard -- PART II: "THEIR LIVES A STORM WHEREON THEY RIDE": AFFECTIVE (DIS)ORDER AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION -- 6. Axing the Frozen Sea: Female Inscriptions of Madness / Joann K. Deiudicibus -- 7. The Things We Carry: Embodied Truth and Tim O' Brien's Poetics of Despair / David Bahr -- 8. 'The Incessant Rise and Fall and Fall and Rise': Virginia Woolf's Treading the Waves / Jessica De Santa -- 9. The Fire, the Dark, and the Beautiful Distance / Stephen Newton |
| Summary |
How does affective madness influence the social understanding of writers and other artists, or shape the creative act itself? In a 15-year longitudinal study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a study little known outside of psychiatry, 80 per cent of the writers reported either living with, or having had a lifetime incidence of, an affective disorder (depression or manic depression), as opposed to only 30 per cent of non-writer controls. "Affective Disorder and the Writing Life" interrogates the age-old mythos of the 'mad writer' through lived experience, literary analysis, writerly reflection, and contemporary neuroscience. These essays explore how affective disorders colour, drive and sometimes silence the writing mind -- and how affective difference has always informed the literary imagination |
| Notes |
Includes index |
|
Also issued online |
| Subject |
Affective disorders.
|
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Authors -- Mental health.
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Authors -- Psychology.
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| Author |
Stone Horton, Stephanie, editor of compilation
|
| ISBN |
1137381655 (hbk.) |
|
9781137381651 (hbk.) |
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