Madness in Post 1945 British and American Fiction

Project Duration

March 2007 - March 2010

Funder

The Leverhulme Trust

Funding

£98,851

Aims

The study aimed to adopt a critical approach in examining the literary representation of madness in post-World War Two UK and US fiction, with reference to language use and changing social and cultural contexts. Four areas of exploration were initially identified:

• Postmodernity
• Power and Institutions
• Ethnicity
• Creativity and Mental Illness

Methods

Unknown.

Outcomes and Findings

In examining the literature stylistically and thematically, we identified a rich post war UK and US literature across the initial themes with a great deal of variety in deployment of motifs in the changing contexts of mental health services in the US and UK, development of diagnostic criteria and shifts in politico-cultural perspectives on the nature of mental illness regimes. Since a good deal of the literature referred to the experience of the contested field of symptoms and diagnostics, a fifth theme of Mental States was identified and explored. 

Broadly, we identified two main thematic functions of madness in fiction. Firstly, there is the kind of story where madness is used as a device, a rhetorical or dramatic motif – madness acts as a vehicle purely for entertainment. Secondly, there are other texts where the theme of madness may have been adopted with provocative, informative and/or politically minded motives. In this kind of work, the author actively seeks to engage with, and at times subvert, the dominant cultural, social and/or media-perpetuated constructions of madness. We focused on the second theme as the first mainly led to stereotyped and unhelpful narrations on madness which tended to be of little critical interest and did not lend itself to analysis.

Publications

Baker, C., Crawford, P., Brown, B., Lipsedge, M., and Carter, R. 2010. Madness in Post-1945 British and American Fiction (London: Palgrave) Forthcoming 2010.

Baker, C. (2011) '"Nobody’s Meat" – Revisiting Rape and Sexual Trauma through Angela Carter' in ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Ethics and Trauma in British Fiction Since 1960 (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi) Forthcoming 2010. 

Baker, C. Invited Literary Advisor and Contributor, Psychiatry PRN eds. Sarah Stringer, Laurence Church, Susan Davison and Maurice Lipsedge. (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2009) 55, 69, 70, 89, 113, 131, 145, 146, 165, 172, 185, 193, 198, 207, 219, 230. 

Baker, C., Crawford, P., Brown, B., Lipsedge, M. and Carter, R. 2008. 'On The Borderline? Borderline Personality Disorder and Deliberate Self Harm in Literature' Social Alternatives 27: 4 (2008) 22-27.

Crawford, P. and Baker, C. 2009. 'Literature and Madness: A survey of fiction for students and professionals' Journal of Medical Humanities 30 (December 2009) 237-251.

Baker, C. BBC World Service, Health Check programme with Claudia Hammond. 10 August, 2010.

Crawford, P. BBC Mundo, with Marcelo Justo, ¿Era Hamlet psicótico y Sherlock Holmes obsesivo? 10 August, 2010. 

Crawford, P. and Baker, C. 'Mad World' Vision 13 (Sept 2007) pp. 1-2.