1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910495876903321

Autore

Caramagno Thomas C

Titolo

The flight of the mind : Virginia Woolf's art and manic-depressive illness / / Thomas C. Caramagno

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c1992

ISBN

0-520-93512-8

0-585-24948-2

Edizione

[Reprint 2020]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xi, 362 p. )

Disciplina

823/.912

B

Soggetti

Novelists, English - 20th century - Biography - Health

People with bipolar disorder

Literature and mental illness

Humanities

Affective Disorders, Psychotic

Mood Disorders

Mental Disorders

Psychiatry

Bipolar Disorder

Literature

English

Languages & Literatures

English Literature

Biography

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

I owned to great egotism the neurotic model in Woolf criticism -- Never was anyone so tossed up & down by the body as I am The sympotom of manic-depression illness -- But what is the meaning of explained it countertransference and modernism -- In casting accounts, never forget to begin with the state of the body genetics and the Stephen family line -- How completely he satisfied her is proved by the collapse



emblematic events in family history -- How immense must be the force of life the art of autobiography and Woolf's bipolar theory of being -- A novel devoted to influenza reading without resolution in the voyage out -- Does anybody know Mr. Flanders? Bipolar cognition and syncretistic vision in Jacob's Room -- The sane & insane, side by side the object-relation of self-management in Mrs. Dalloway -- It is finished ambivalence resolved, self restored in To the Light house -- I do not know altogether who I am the plurality of intrasubjective life in the Waves.

Sommario/riassunto

The author 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.