Literatures of Madness

1. Introduction: Breathing in Airless Spaces, Elizabeth J. Donaldson.- 2. Coming Out Mad, Coming Out Disabled, Elizabeth Brewer.- 3. Going Barefoot: Mad Affiliation, Identity Politics, and Eros, PhebeAnn M. Wolframe.- 4. "Hundreds of People Like Me": A Search for a Mad Community in The Bell Jar, Rose Miyatsu.- 5. Writing Madness in Indigenous Literature: A Hesitation, Erin Soros.- 6. "Is the young lady mad?": Psychiatric Disability in Louisa May Alcott's Fiction, Karen Valerius.- 7.The Snake Pit: Mary Jane Ward's Asylum Fiction and Mental Health Advocacy, Elizabeth J. Donaldson.- 8. Alcoholic, Mad, Disabled: Constructing Lesbian Identity in Ann Bannon's "Beebo Brinker Chronicles", Tatiana Prorokova.- 9. Seeing Words, Hearing Voices: Hannah Weiner, Dora García, and the Poetic Performance of Radical Dis/Humanism, Andrew McEwan.- 10. "My Difference Is Not My [Mental] Sickness": Ethnicity and Erasure in Joanne Greenberg's Jewish American Life Writing, Gail Berkeley Sherman.- 11. Resistance, Suffering, and Psychiatric Disability in Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom and Amandeep Sandhu's Sepia Leaves, Srikanth Mallavarapu.- 12. Mental Disability and Social Value in Michelle Cliff's Abeng, Drew Holladay.- 13. It Doesn't Add Up: Mental Illness in Paul Hornschemeier's Mother Come Home, Jessica Gross.

Elizabeth J. Donaldson is Associate Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology, where she directs the Medical Humanities program. She is co-editor of The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (2012).

"Literatures of Madness stands as an insightful complement to pivotal mad studies volumes like Brenda A. LeFrançois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume's Mad Matters (2013) and Helen Spandler, Jill Anderson, and Bob Sapey'sMadness, Distress and the Politics of Disablement (2015). The collection is a productive addition to our work as mad readers and teachers, and it can only encourage us to continue learning and addressing the rhetorical and material diversity of our madnesses." (Hayley C. Stefan,Disability Studies Quarterly, dsq-sds.org, Vol. 41 (1), 2021)

"The collection of differing viewpoints is also one of the strengths of the edited collection format, and this group of essays presents a collection of impressive range and interest. ... the essays of this collection powerfully demonstrate the importance of literary and fictional models for envisioning alternatives to structures of exclusion and misunderstanding." (Susan Anderson, H-Disability, networks.h-net.org, April, 2019)
"This groundbreaking book takes as its premise a series of commitments to bridging myriad gaps, anew. In its formulations, which critique overtly but likewise adopt necessarily the specificities of academic publication requirements, a plethora of people's divergent disability ('crip') identities and variegated mental health/illness ('mad') identities no longer need to be split (no pun, here) along an already false binary line." (Diane R. Wiener, metapsychology online reviews, metapsychology.mentalhelp.net, Vol. 23 (4), January, 2019)