The thesis operates upon the premise that there has been, in the
course of the last two centuries, a radical transformation in narrative
presentations of exceptional states of consciousness. It sets out to
identify the main characteristics of the fictional transformation, and to
situate them in the context of wider cultural shifts. I decided to rest
my approach upon the relatively conservative sense that, roughly speaking,
the structural and linguistic analysis of a narrative topos - that is to
say the protagonist's madness - can elicit a clearer understanding of the
changing, underlying dynamics and thematics of fictional works as they
emerge over a given historical period.
The thesis is set out in two parts; Part I explores nineteenth
century uses of madness, and Part II compares and contrasts more recent
treatments. The study of the different presentations of madness in
fiction is organized diachronically for heuristic purposes, although the
typological emphasis of the thesis must eventually take precedence over
the imposition of a rigid historical framework.
In the nineteenth century it is predominantly an intellectually
marginalized kind of fiction (often termed 'gothic') which deals with
exceptional psychic experience. It does so in a way which engages with
the treacherous 'otherness' of mad experience, which is often aligned with
the supernatural. In these texts the position of the narrator in relation
to such phenomenon is of paramount importance. More recent treatments of
'madness' display a tendency to undermine its 'otherness' and to move
towards narrative identification with such states.
The method of investigation functions upon several levels. In order
to provide a constructive counter-perspective upon fictional treatments of
madness and to forge the link with contemporary methodologies, the study
commences with the narratological analysis of a work written by a
(clinically diagnosed) psychotic author which has achieved the status of a
classic within psychiatric, psychoanalytical and even recent cultural
theory. The narrative structure of D. P. Schreber's Memoirs finds its
equivalent in a kind of fiction identified in this thesis as 'paranoid'.
Twentieth century clinical discourse increasingly has recourse to the
very broad term 'schizophrenia' as a synonym for the outmoded term
'madness'. The current emphasis upon linguistic concerns in the definition
and location of psychosis allows the critical grouping of certain kinds of
texts under the heading of 'schizoid', due to the discovery of analogous
characteristics at work within their (anti)narrative strategy. Again, these
terms are heuristically intended and cannot be scientifically precise. The
thesis concludes with a discussion of the current centrality of a
terminology of psychopathology to the ways in which fictionists, critics
and theorists describe, prescribe and understand the 'postmodern' self and
world.
This project offers an overview of attitudes to madness as they are
transformed in fiction in the course of a historical period. The way in
which madness functions in these texts is, first of all, not only as the
instrument of literary exploration but also as a means of transgressing
boundaries between sanity and insanity. The period is crucial, further, in
its radical transitional nature with regard to concepts of fundamental
import for the novel form: most particularly, ideas of the 'self' and ideas
of 'reality', as objectively stable or as sub. iective and illusory. For the
fictional articulation of these, the topos of 'madness' serves as the
ultimate measure.

The uses of madness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction : the relation between narrative strategy and disturbed states of consciousness

Because of critical neglect, there is no established terminology to describe techniques of suspense. Borrowing from Aristotle, Koestler, and others, a new body of concepts is suggested and importantly, a distinction of tense is established, between types of suspense which relate to the narrative past, present, and future. The classical world's intuition of a connection between mental uncertainty and the physical state of hanging has conditioned Western man's notion of narrative suspense until a comparatively recent date. Eighteenth-century theories of the sublime helped to create an understanding that suspense was not necessarily painful. Through an analysis of novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, and Conrad, an attempt is made to identify and evaluate the most common suspense strategies in the period's popular genres, notably the Austenian romance, mystery, and tragedy. The Austenian romance is compared to the detective story in that narrative presentation is determined by the need to control the reader's expectations, and to achieve an ending which is both satisfactory and surprising. The latter requirement may have contributed to the gradual disappearance of the authorial "voice" in the course of the nineteenth century, and a consequent reduction in the pleasures of irony and comedy. During the Victorian period, many genres are combined in the long novel, but mystery gradually advances in popularity and sophistication, to the point where narrative events are often inappropriately exploited as secrets. Tragedy involves a creative conflict between the reader's hopes and expectations, so he is permitted to glimpse the overall tragic process, and suspense is generated on the levels of theme and causaliy. The problems incurred by an inability or unwillingness to conclude structures of theme suspense are considered finally.

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Suspense in the English novel from Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad

A propos de Esther Waters, l'attitude de M. a l'egard des femmes -dans ses implications politiques et esthetiques- est une invitation pour les ecrivains des deux sexes a experimenter ensemble de nouvelles formes narratives dans une periode de transition.

Subjectivity and Story in George Moore's Esther Waters

The Case of the Split Self: George Moore's Debt to Schopenhauer in Esther Waters

ABSTRACT Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is often read through the lens of psychoanalysis and taken as a model of postmodern fiction with its indeterminable, norm-subverting, hermeneutic narrative. Yet, as Pierce Inverarity, the ultimate capitalist, stands as the absent center of the mystery, this paper re-approaches Lot 49 and proposes that buried beneath its detective/mystery threads is a potent critique of the political-economic milieu of the sixties California. The various tropes, from the captive Rapunzel, Remedios Varo’s triptych, the duplicitous Trystero, to the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, knit out a world that is consolidated by economic activities and above all commodity fetishism. The article contends that Lot 49 is a reply to the sociopolitical discourses and the civil movements of the sixties. Drawing on economic and communication activities, Lot 49 breaks down the conventional binary distinction and demonstrates a complex interplay of capital, credit, and rhetoric that fabricates a postmodern world of which “all that is solid melts into air.”

The Economic Wonderland of Thomas Pynchon’s the Crying of Lot 49

Missing Mysteries@@@Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie

The crucial problem for characters in a naturalistic novel is to find an effective and responsible way of saying "yes." The saying of "no" in such works is comparatively easy, but the odds are distinctly against affirmation, as a glance at any representative sample of this fiction soon makes clear. In Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, for instance, we meet a character whose life is wholly determined for him by a collection of environmental and genetic influences over which he has no control. Even as a rigid class system coldly frustrates Jude's considerable efforts to improve himself through hard work and honest devotion to ideals, a baleful defect of the flesh, alluded to by his aunt in her oracular pronouncement that "'the Fawleys were not made for wedlock; there's sommat in our blood,'" thwarts all of his attempts to achieve happiness with women. In the face of such a coercive determinism, the only honorable response, most readers are likely to agree, is a strong and self-assertive "no," a satanic non serviam; anything less-certainly any form of acquiescence-would seem craven, a failure of human dignity, a denial of free will. "'Cannot we kill you?'" the invading Danes challenge St. Edmund in Carlyle's Past and Present, embodying in their threat all the injustice and oppression of a naturalistic universe. To which the stubborn saint replies, "'Cannot I die?'" Jude makes much the same defiant response to the powerful forces that control him. When Christminster officials refuse to admit him to their exclusive academic circle and oblige him to abandon hope of a scholarly career, he denounces them in a bitter passage from Job. And when his disastrous experiences with women confirm the accuracy of his aunt's prediction, he says "no" to these defeats too, persisting, however futilely, in his dream of domestic happiness. It may be argued that Jude's strong if ineffectual "no" to an oppressive universe is in reality a form of affirmation; that in saying "no" to the forces that seek to control him, he is in fact saying "yes" to himself, to the independent order and needs of his own nature. This view would place Jude in the great tradition of Romantic life-affirmers-yea-sayers whose celebration of self is of necessity preceded by a rejection of forces hostile to the self-and therefore in the

Elliot L. Gilbert

Papers

Missing Mysteries@@@Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie

In the Flesh: "Esther Waters" and the Passion for Yes