The Novel is Going Mad

The Novel is Going Mad challenges the notion that novels replicate the forces of normativity. Expanding on the vibrant work in Mad and Disability literary studies and drawing on work in Queer Theory, this dissertation argues that novels do mad work – that is, novels invite readers to participate in madness as a re-orientation away from the normative centre. Collectively the novels in this study articulate various mad novelistic technologies including language, structure, atmosphere, temporality, and embodiment as part of a larger argument that madness is not something that is merely understood as a facet of literary representation. As such the chapters consider emergent, recurring and uneven technologies of the novel across the nineteenth and twentieth century to demonstrate how formal and representational madness coincides. The project begins with an account of mad language to propose that novels attempt to comprehend madness through structural means and metaphorical modes. Drawing on this understanding of language I then challenge the notion that novels normalize through the plot device of the death of the non-normative character by demonstrating that madness resides elsewhere in atmosphere and therefore lingers as a counter-mood. These readings culminate in an account of embodiment in both Victorian and Modernist literature to demonstrate that novels articulate madness through narrative structure, plot, and character perspective to ultimately argue that madness challenges the way we understand the boundaries of our bodies. The dissertation closes to consider mad work in pedagogical practice with a particular attention to fostering mad community.