Madness in Western literature and the arts

Abstract

One can write a historical survey of treatments of madness and the mad in literature and the fine arts. Another option is to present the cultural history of madness via its conventional periodization or a series of tectonic shifts in Western cultural perception of the mad. Konstantin Batiushkov's poetic persona has been closely associated in the history of Russian literature with a newly discovered power of creative imagination. Batiushkov's madness is presented by Piotr Viazemsky both as a deep personal tragedy and mystery of life. At the turn of the eighteenth century, madness was reinterpreted in the West as a disease, rather than a crime and became one of the core themes in Western literature and the arts. The mad inspired physicians and artists alike, with medical cases treated by doctors as literary and literary works about the mad as medical ones.