Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Doreen Bauschke and Anna Klambauer -- Mad Female Doubles in Attics and Drawing Rooms -- Subversive Madness: Madwomen, Doubles, and Mad Resistance in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea / Anna Klambauer -- Double the Sensation: Mad Doubles in the Sensation Fiction of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon / Rachel A. Sims -- In a Mad World Is Madness Divinest Sense? -- Delivering Humanity from Normalcy: Madness in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge as Only Chance for Sanity / Doreen Bauschke -- Mad Prophets in a Mad World: William Blake’s Apocalyptic Vision and the Revival of British Millenarianism / Ruxanda Topor -- The Blessed ‘Mad Ones’ in Howl and On the Road / Terri Jane Dow -- Beyond Convention: Mad Artists and Mad Artistic Expressions -- Breaking Mad: From Artaud to Ginsberg / Peter Gunn -- Art Brut: The Sensibility of Outsiders in the Era of Late Capitalism / Isil Ezgi Celik -- Post-Madwoman Writing and The Book of Ambiguity / Teresa Bell.

This volume explores the intriguing ontological ambiguities of madness in literature and the arts. Despite its association with a diseased/abnormal mind, there can be much sense and sensibility in madness. Daring to break free from the dictates of normalcy, madwomen and madmen disrupt the status quo. Yet, as they venture into unchartered or prohibited terrain, they may also unleash the liberatory and transformative potential of unrestrained madness. Contributors are Doreen Bauschke, Teresa Bell, Isil Ezgi Celik, Terri Jane Dow, Peter Gunn, Anna Klambauer, Rachel A. Sims and Ruxanda Topor.