Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

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 a study which employs the insights of current post-structuralist psychoanalysis and semiotic theory to examine the complex implication of the subject and object of madness that is always implied by the dynamics of analytic diagnosis.

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.