Literatures of Madness, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Disability Studies and Mental Health
Literary Disability Studies Series

Coordinator: Donaldson Elizabeth J.

Language: English

31.64 €

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Literatures of Madness
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137.14 €

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Literatures of Madness
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Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health brings together scholars working in disability studies, mad studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, Jewish literature, queer studies, American studies, trauma studies, and comics to create an intersectional community of scholarship in literary disability studies of mental health. The collection contains essays on canonical authors and lesser known and sometimes forgotten writers, including Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Weiner, Mary Jane Ward, Michelle Cliff, Lee Maracle, Joanne Greenberg, Ann Bannon, Jerry Pinto, Persimmon Blackbridge, and others. The volume addresses the under-representation of madness and psychiatric disability in the field of disability studies, which traditionally focuses on physical disability, and explores the controversies and the common ground among disability studies, anti-psychiatric discourses, mad studies, graphic medicine, and health/medical humanities.


1. Introduction: Breathing in Airless Spaces, Elizabeth J. Donaldson.- 2. Coming Out Mad, Coming Out Disabled, Elizabeth Brewer.- 3. Going Barefoot: Mad Affiliation, Identity Politics, and Eros, PhebeAnn M. Wolframe.- 4. “Hundreds of People Like Me”: A Search for a Mad Community in The Bell Jar, Rose Miyatsu.- 5. Writing Madness in Indigenous Literature: A Hesitation, Erin Soros.- 6. “Is the young lady mad?”: Psychiatric Disability in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction, Karen Valerius.- 7.The Snake Pit: Mary Jane Ward’s Asylum Fiction and Mental Health Advocacy, Elizabeth J. Donaldson.- 8. Alcoholic, Mad, Disabled: Constructing Lesbian Identity in Ann Bannon’s “Beebo Brinker Chronicles”, Tatiana Prorokova.- 9. Seeing Words, Hearing Voices: Hannah Weiner, Dora García, and the Poetic Performance of Radical Dis/Humanism, Andrew McEwan.- 10. “My Difference Is Not My [Mental] Sickness”: Ethnicity and Erasure in Joanne Greenberg’s Jewish American Life Writing, Gail Berkeley Sherman.- 11. Resistance, Suffering, and Psychiatric Disability in Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom and Amandeep Sandhu’s Sepia Leaves, Srikanth Mallavarapu.- 12. Mental Disability and Social Value in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, Drew Holladay.- 13. It Doesn’t Add Up: Mental Illness in Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother Come Home, Jessica Gross.

Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Associate Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology, where she directs the Medical Humanities program. She is co-editor of The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (2012).


Contributes to scholarly criticism on twentieth-century women writers Expands literary disabilities to the subject of mental health Highlights little-known authors and texts