20th century authors
20th century literature
A01=Thomas C. Caramagno
Author_Thomas C. Caramagno
bipolar disorder
british literary criticism
british literature
british novelist
Category=DNB
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=MKL
classic british authors
creative process
depression and literature
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
history of mental illness
literary criticism
literary studies
literature and mental illness
literature and psychology
mental health
mental illness
mental illness and creativity
mind and brain
psychobiography
psychopathology
stream of consciousness
woolf and madness
woolf and manic depression
woolf studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780520072800
- Weight: 816g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Jul 1992
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian 'family romance,' reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood. But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness - its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function - reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.
Thomas C. Caramagno teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska. Kay Redfield Jamison is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
