This is the first monograph to consider the significance of madness and irrationality in both Spanish and Spanish American literature. It considers various definitions of ‘madness’ and explores the often contrasting responses, both positive (figural madness as stimulus for literary creativity) and negative (clinical madness representing spiritual confinement and sterility). The concept of national madness is explored with particular reference to Argentina: while, on the one hand, the country’s vast expanses have been seen as conducive to madness, the urban population of Buenos Aires, on the other, appears to be especially dependent on psychoanalytic therapy. The book considers both the work of lesser-known writers such as Nuria Amat, whose personal life is inflected by a form of literary madness, and that of larger literary figures such as José Lezama Lima, whose poetic concepts are suffused with the irrational. The conclusion draws attention to the ‘other side’ of reason as a source of possible originality in a world dominated by the tenets of logic and conventionalised thinking.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. The Concept of National Madness: the Argentine Paradigm
3. ‘Voices in the Wilderness’: Conquest and Counter-conquest in Abel Posse
4. Morality, Madness, Memory: Royal Women in Fernando del Paso (Noticias del Imperio) and Lourdes Ortiz (Urraca).
5. Crime, Madness, Art: Alejandra Pizarnik and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
6. Books about Books: Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento and Pérez-Reverte’s El club Dumas
7. Self-Consciousness and Schizophrenia: the Literary World of Nuria Amat
8. Joy in Paradise: José Lezama Lima
9. Desert, Delirium, Digression: the Fictional Worlds of Juan José Saer
10. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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