ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book begins with Mrs Dalloway, a work in which madness and suicide have a manifestly central place, and one that apparently is clearly demarcated, but in which it turned out that the centre was everywhere and the circumference nowhere to be found. We have seen how, through their relation to madness, these texts systematically challenge the frontiers that constitute novelistic fiction. There could be no better analysis of the novel, and the work of art in general, as a function of misrecognition and exclusion. In this connection, we think of another high point of English romanticism, diametrically opposed to the ruins of Ozymandias, to the very symbol of an art tautologically closed in on itself in self-sufficiency. The integrity of the representation and all its 'sides', including the subjective side, thus has as its counterpart, elsewhere an ever-enlarging hole.
