ABSTRACT
FEDER’s book is highly recommended as a solid overview of literary treatments of madness from Euripides to Wole Soyinka. The organization is chronological: Feder gives historically contextualized readings of literary against non-literary texts dealing with madness. Feder is not simply interested in the representation of madness, but in the logic of madness itself. Her theoretical orientation is psychoanalytical, and readers may be put off by the apparent conflation with literary representation of real human pathologies. Feder addresses this concern in her Introduction, taking essentially a Jungian view of the role of the artist as representative of group, as well as individual anxieties.
