Aims and Objectives
Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded Madness and Literature Network
The Madness and Literature Network aims to stimulate cooperation and co-working between researchers, academics, clinicians, service users, carers and creative writers in order to develop an interdisciplinary, global dialogue about the issues raised around representations of madness in literature. Literary research has become a key resource for the advancement of medical and health professionals' education, affording broader perspectives, critical thinking skills and promoting an emotionally receptive or empathic climate for clinical practice. With this project, we are seeking to form new methodologies, strengthen and maintain partnerships and enable comprehensive critical dialogues across the fields of literature, linguistics and mental health care.
The term 'madness' is employed deliberately to signal our alignment with literary and historical scholarship and our commitment to a broad, inclusive approach, rather than a necessarily narrower clinical focus as would be implied by terms such as ‘mental disorder’, ‘mental illness’, or by naming a specific illness in our titling. We encourage individual reviewers to use whichever language they are comfortable with or find useful when writing for our site.
With financial support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, we are developing an International Madness and Literature Network, consisting of interested clinicians, academics from a variety of humanities-based disciplines and service users. The project consists of three main strands:
Website – The website has been developed with that aim of internationalising the Network. It contains a growing database of fiction and autobiography relating to madness and mental health – this currently has around 100 books included in it, which have been read and reviewed in part for the Leverhulme Trust funded project, hence it has a post-war focus at this stage. We welcome reviews from members of our network of any texts relating to issues of madness and mental health. These reviews will be fully peer-reviewed and published on the site, with full accreditation to the reviewer.
Four Seminars - Femi Oyebode spoke at our first seminar on Power and Psychiatry. Our second seminar was in May 2009 on Creativity and Mental Health, with authors Paul Sayer and Patrick Gale leading the day. The final two seminars were focused on Mental States, with Charley Baker, Professor Patricia Duncker and Dr Maurice Lipsedge presenting papers, and Ethnicity, Diversity, Madness and Fiction, with Professor Mark Johnson leading the day and additional papers presented by Paul Crawford and Brian Brown. Podcasts are available for a selection of these talks.
The 1st International Health Humanities Conference – In August 2010 the Institute of Mental Health and the Madness and Literature Network will be hosting the 1st International Health Humanities Conference International Health Humanities Conference Flyer | Registration Form
The Leverhulme Trust Funded Project – Madness in Post-war British and American Fiction
With a generous grant from The Leverhulme Trust, our five-strong team is examining representations of madness in post-war British and American fiction. A number of research papers have arisen from this project, several of which have been presented at conferences. The team has been contracted to Palgrave and is currently writing a book, provisionally entitled Madness in Post-War British and American Fiction, due for publication in 2010.
There have also been practical outputs stemming from this project – for example, a series of readings given at the Nottingham Mental Health Awareness Week and a Get Into Reading bibliotherapeutic group, run in a deprived area of Nottingham, that has been developed by Charley Baker and Ronald Carter among others.