It's a Mad, Mad World

Andrew Gaedtke's study of the relationship between avant-garde literary modernism and twentieth-century madness goes considerably beyond previous approaches to the topic. Although it is now commonplace to speak of how modernist texts represent the schizophrenia, psychosis, paranoia, and psychic dysfunction resulting from the modernization process, the most influential works rely on metaphorical relations between literature and madness. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) drew its eponymous figure from Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. Wylie Sypher's The Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art (1962) draws on philosophical existentialism to treat the literary theme of attenuated subjectivity in the modern period. Marta Caminero-Santangelo's The Madwoman Can't Speak, or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive (1998) plays on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) in order to interpret the legacy of “mad speech” by...