Review of 'Quand la folie parle: The Dialectic Effect of Madness in French Literature since the Nineteenth Century'. Edited by Gillian Ni Cheallaigh, Laura Jackson, and Siobhán McIlvanney. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. xi + 221 pp.

Abstract

This volume is the result of the 2011 London French Postgraduate Conference entitled 'The Many Faces of Madness: Representations of Madness in French Literature from the Middle Ages'. It sets out to explore both "texts that speak of madness as well as those that speak from madness" (p. 1), and collects an assortment of essays by young scholars that examine different facets of mental illness and their literary representations from the early nineteenth century to the present day. A convincing two-page Foreword and a well-crafted Introduction open the volume, aiming to outline a fil rouge within a diverse collection of work. We are invited to welcome a 'dialectic effect' rather than look for a univocal perspective, to embrace the abundance of the human experiences presented, and, more generally, "to recognise the human value of madness and its value to humanity" (p. 8). Ten generally well-argued and well-contextualized chapters fall into three chronological groupings.