<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>The article explores man’s eternal fascination with madness or the presumption that a person acts, behaves beyond the rules of the community, of the norm. The work explores the brief literary history of mania, of divine madness as it appears in antiquity. In the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare depicts the world as a stage and the human characters and their behaviours as important pieces of the puzzle that Freud would later describe in his work dedicated to the human psyche. The article is named after Doris Lessing’s novel, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, a novel that imagines the fantastical “inner-space” life of an amnesiac, a man supposed to be mad. Madness and moreover its depiction are mere performances of imagination on our part, because all literary endeavours on depicting madness are attempts to understand a universe, a reality, a pathology so different from our reality or what we consider to be real.</p>
</abstract>

The article explores man’s eternal fascination with madness or the presumption that a person acts, behaves beyond the rules of the community, of the norm. The work explores the brief literary history of mania, of divine madness as it appears in antiquity. In the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare depicts the world as a stage and the human characters and their behaviours as important pieces of the puzzle that Freud would later describe in his work dedicated to the human psyche. The article is named after Doris Lessing’s novel, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, a novel that imagines the fantastical “inner-space” life of an amnesiac, a man supposed to be mad. Madness and moreover its depiction are mere performances of imagination on our part, because all literary endeavours on depicting madness are attempts to understand a universe, a reality, a pathology so different from our reality or what we consider to be real.

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: Madness as a Literary Motif in World Literature

Lecturer, PhD, „Victor Babeș” University of Medicine and Pharmacy

Acta Marisiensis. Philologia

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The article explores man’s eternal fascination with madness or the presumption that a person acts, behaves beyond the rules of the community, of the norm. The...

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: Madness as a Literary Motif in World Literature

Published Online: Feb 01, 2023

Page range: 1 - 7

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/amph-2022-0067

Keywords
madness, divine madness, performance, tragedy, pathology

© 2022 Simona Olaru-Poşiar, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: Madness as a Literary Motif in World Literature

Published Online: Feb 01, 2023

Page range: 1 - 7

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/amph-2022-0067

Keywordsmadness, divine madness, performance, tragedy, pathology

© 2022 Simona Olaru-Poşiar, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Keywords
madness, divine madness, performance, tragedy, pathology