Affective Disorder and the Writing Life

Affective Disorder and the Writing Life interrogates the mythos of the 'mad writer' through lived experience, literary analysis, writerly reflection and contemporary neuroscience. It explores how affective disorders colour, drive and sometimes silence the writing mind - and how affective difference has always informed the literary imagination.

Foreword Notes on the Contributors PART I: "COULD IT BE MADNESS, THIS?" AFFECTIVE DIFFERENCE AND THE WORK OF COMPOSITION 1. 'What Ceremony of Words Can Patch the Havoc?': Writing, Madness, and Neurodiversity; 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