Affective Disorder and the Writing Life: The Melancholic Muse

Part I. “Could It Be Madness, This?” Affective Difference and the Work of Composition

1. “What Ceremony of Words Can Patch the Havoc?”: Composition and Madness
Stephanie Stone Horton

2. Muse Afire: Negotiating the Line between Creative Pursuit and Mental Illness
Nancer Ballard

3. After the Fire Goes Out: Writing before and after Treatment for an Affective Disorder
Lise Bagoley

4. Gaps on the Vita
Sharon O’Brien

5. Lunatic
Jeannie Parker Beard

Part II. “Their Lives a Storm Whereon They Ride”: Affective (Dis)order and the Literary Imagination

6. Axing the Frozen Sea: Female Inscriptions of Madness
Joann K. Deiudicibus

7. The Things We Carry: Embodied Truth and Tim O’Brien’s Poetics of Despair
David Bahr

8. “The Incessant Rise and Fall and Fall and Rise”: Virginia Woolf Treading the Waves
Jessica Santa

9. The Fire, the Dark, and the Beautiful Distance
Stephen Newton

Keywords: Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, Creative Writing, Fiction