"MacLennan approaches the eight writers from a broadly sociohistorical viewpoint and takes into account relevant biographical and medical evidence, where available, examining their situations as revealed or mediated by their writings. Through a series of detailed analyses, he argues that these writings bear witness to a progressively increasing degree of psychological inwardness in Western culture. This is a process that affects both how madness is experienced by the individual and how it is expressed in subjective writing. By the late eighteenth century, madness becomes, for a significant number of writers and artists, an intimately interiorized condition, one which implicates their entire affective life. It is this subjectivized and "existential" madness that, in the Romantic period and subsequently, has been taken to express an "inner truth" in an increasingly secularized and alienating state of society." "In taking these developments into account, Lucid Interval is able to arrive at a fresh understanding of the appearance in the modern period of such figures as Clare and de Nerval--writers who suffer madness as an inner, subjective catastrophe but who, in the midst of that experience, are able to explore it creatively, so producing a "literature of madness," which is a new phenomenon in itself and which sets a troubling precedent for modern culture."--BOOK JACKET.