Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health

What does literature make possible when madness is read not simply as a diagnosis or plot device, but as an experience shaped by identity, history, culture, and power? Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health, edited by Elizabeth J. Donaldson, brings literary criticism into conversation with disability studies and mad studies to explore that question across a wide range of texts and traditions.

Three perspectives on madness in literature

The collection is organized around three themes: “Mad Community,” “Mad History,” and “Mad Survival.” Together, these sections trace how literary works imagine belonging and identity, reflect changing social and psychiatric contexts, and represent resistance, suffering, and the search for value and recognition.

From familiar classics to overlooked writing

Essays examine works associated with Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Jane Ward, Ann Bannon, Hannah Weiner, Joanne Greenberg, Jerry Pinto, Michelle Cliff, and other writers. The range brings canonical and less frequently discussed texts into the same critical conversation, including Indigenous, Jewish American, lesbian, and South Asian literary contexts.

Where literary criticism meets disability studies

Rather than treating mental health as a single, universal subject, the contributors consider how madness and psychiatric disability intersect with gender, ethnicity, sexuality, history, and social expectations. The collection also engages with debates and points of connection among disability studies, mad studies, anti-psychiatric discourse, graphic medicine, and health and medical humanities.

For readers and researchers

This volume will interest readers of literary criticism and disability studies, as well as students and researchers exploring cultural representations of mental health. Its interdisciplinary essays offer a way to reconsider how literature can shape understandings of psychiatric disability, community, and lived experience.

Explore a substantial, carefully varied body of scholarship on the literary meanings of madness and mental health.