The Flight of the Mind

Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness
1. Auflage 1992
ISBN: 978-0-520-07280-0
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 362 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 798 g

In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood.

But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness—its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function—reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Caramagno, Thomas C.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Jamison, Kay Redfield

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologie: Allgemeines

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures and Illustrations
Introduction

1. "I Owned to Great Egotism":  The Neurotic Model in Woolf Criticism
2. "Never Was Anyone So Tossed Up & Down by the Body As I Am":  The Symptoms of Manic-Depressive Illness
3. "But What Is the Meaning of 'Explained' It?"  Countertransference and Modernism
4. "In Casting Accounts, Never Forget to Begin with the State of the Body":  Genetics and the Stephen Family Linc
5. "How Completely He Satisfied Her Is Proved by the Collapse":  Emblematic Events in Family History
6. "How Immense Must Be the Force of Life":  The Art of Autobiography and Woolf's Bipolar Theory of Being
7. "A Novel Devoted to Influenza":  Reading without Resolution in The Voyqge Out
8. "Does Anybody Know Mr. Flanders?"  Bipolar Cognition and Syncretistic Vision in Jacob's Room

9. "The Sane & the Insane, Side by Side":  The Object-Relations of Self Management in Mrs. Dallollway

10. "It Is Finished": Ambivalence Resolved, Self Restored in To the Liqhthouse

11. "I Do Not Know Altogether Who I Am": The Plurality of lntrasubjective Life in The Waves

Epilogue: Science and Subjectivity

Afterword, by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

Appendix: Virginia Woolf's Mood Swing Chart (1895-1941)

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Thomas C. Caramagno teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska. Kay Redfield Jamison is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.