Discourses of Madness
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2024) | Viewed by 6679
Special Issue Editor
Interests: French, European and comparative literature; contemporary critical theory and practice; textual configurations of marginalization and the poetics of desire; post-colonial literary and cultural studies; Afro-Romance and Afro-Atlantic writers
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Today I felt pass over me a breath of wind from the wings of madness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Literary artists and textualists have long been fascinated by the alienated, the marginalized, the eccentric; intrigued, if not befuddled, by their non-conformity, their recalcitrance, their obstinate refusal to adhere; seized by their indifference to social norms and prescribed dictates; lured, if not bemused, by their fundamental apartness or uncompromising candor. In this optic, the non-clinical dimensions of madness have been extensively explored in short stories, novels, poems, dramas, comedies, treatises, exposés, essays, epistles, even in post-modern counter-narratives masquerading as autobiographical memoirs. In consequence of this critical and meta-critical abundance, it is not uncommon to discover writings by scholars of the mind, specialists in applied psychiatric theory, eager to proffer accounts of “textualized” insanity, its plethoric configurations and manifestations.
In Michel Foucault’s seminal work, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), and throughout literary history, madness has been inextricably linked to myth and religion, to societal practices and cultural biases. From Viking berserkers to impassioned lovers in search of elusive soulmates, emotional excess has often served to delineate norms and to assign diagnostic terms to those who fall without prescribed, predisposed boundaries.
This Special Issue invites contributions that span chronology, culture, and genre in an (individual and collective) attempt to probe the depths of a heterogenous, yet ill-defined phenomenon that has fascinated and perplexed writers and readers since the beginning of time. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, the essays to inhabit this volume will constitute a trans-temporal illumination—pathological and poetic—of discourse and madness alike.
Notations
Contributions of 5000-12000 words are welcome (although the merits of individual submissions will take precedence over essay length).
While the publication deadline for submission to this Special Issue is 30 June 2024, articles will be published online shortly after final acceptance.
Prof. Dr. Mary Jo Muratore
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- madness
- discourse
- pathology
- poetics
- textuality
- marginality
- deviance
- alienation
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