The Flight of the Mind :Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness

4.29 ( 106 Ratings by Goodreads)
The Flight of the Mind

The Flight of the Mind :Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness

4.29 (106 Ratings by Goodreads)
paperback
Published: 3 May, 1996
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Description

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.
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More Details

Type Book
ISBN13 9780520205048
ISBN10 0520205049
Number Of Pages 362
Item Weight 499 g
Product Dimensions 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Publisher / Reseller University of California Press
Format paperback
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Author's Bio

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.

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