Madness and Romanticism in Percy Shelley's "Julian and Maddalo"
(2025) In Narratives and Mental Health 4. p.91-112- Abstract
- There is now a widespread scholarly consensus that we can see in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a close but complex discursive and institutional relationship between mental illness and the set of cultural assumptions and practices which we call “Romanticism”. My purpose in this essay is to explore how that relationship is both manifested in and challenged by the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poem “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation.” Shelley’s poem has been curiously peripheral to academic histories of the engagement with mental illness in Romantic-period cultural texts: it is often identified in such histories as significant but then only actually considered in passing. At the centre of “Julian and... (More)
- There is now a widespread scholarly consensus that we can see in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a close but complex discursive and institutional relationship between mental illness and the set of cultural assumptions and practices which we call “Romanticism”. My purpose in this essay is to explore how that relationship is both manifested in and challenged by the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poem “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation.” Shelley’s poem has been curiously peripheral to academic histories of the engagement with mental illness in Romantic-period cultural texts: it is often identified in such histories as significant but then only actually considered in passing. At the centre of “Julian and Maddalo” is a psychiatric situation. The two titular characters, based in part on Shelley and Byron, visit the cell of a “Maniac”, on an island in Laguna di Venezia, in the hope that studying his “wild language” – finding “an entrance to the caverns of his mind” (line 573), as Julian puts it – will help to resolve their own difficult “conversation” about human nature and destiny. My essay examines two aspects of the engagement with contemporary ideas about madness in the poem: the representation of the “madhouse” (line 107), which Maddalo describes as “the emblem and the sign” (line 121) of the human condition, and the characterisation of the Maniac. I illustrate the extent to which “Julian and Maddalo” is both informed by and responds to contemporary psychiatric discourse concerning the origins, nature, and prognosis, of mental illness, and the possibility of a cure through “moral management.” Specifically, I argue that “Julian and Maddalo” interrogates the nosological description of mania and melancholia, by figures like Erasmus Darwin, Nathan Drake, and Philippe Pinel, as dysfunctions of the imagination which are triggered by emotional trauma – and for which poetry can be both, potentially, a symptom and a cure. (Less)
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- author
- Duffy, Cian LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2025
- type
- Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
- publication status
- published
- subject
- host publication
- The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry
- series title
- Narratives and Mental Health
- editor
- Roeder, Katrin and Wachter, Cornelia
- volume
- 4
- pages
- 91 - 112
- publisher
- Brill
- ISSN
- 2667-0518
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-74523-0
- 978-90-04-74524-7
- DOI
- 10.1163/9789004745247_007
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- ffbbf4ad-0e81-4463-87d6-84cf03507cbe
- date added to LUP
- 2023-10-27 10:52:17
- date last changed
- 2025-12-01 11:25:38
@inbook{ffbbf4ad-0e81-4463-87d6-84cf03507cbe,
abstract = {{There is now a widespread scholarly consensus that we can see in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a close but complex discursive and institutional relationship between mental illness and the set of cultural assumptions and practices which we call “Romanticism”. My purpose in this essay is to explore how that relationship is both manifested in and challenged by the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poem “Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation.” Shelley’s poem has been curiously peripheral to academic histories of the engagement with mental illness in Romantic-period cultural texts: it is often identified in such histories as significant but then only actually considered in passing. At the centre of “Julian and Maddalo” is a psychiatric situation. The two titular characters, based in part on Shelley and Byron, visit the cell of a “Maniac”, on an island in Laguna di Venezia, in the hope that studying his “wild language” – finding “an entrance to the caverns of his mind” (line 573), as Julian puts it – will help to resolve their own difficult “conversation” about human nature and destiny. My essay examines two aspects of the engagement with contemporary ideas about madness in the poem: the representation of the “madhouse” (line 107), which Maddalo describes as “the emblem and the sign” (line 121) of the human condition, and the characterisation of the Maniac. I illustrate the extent to which “Julian and Maddalo” is both informed by and responds to contemporary psychiatric discourse concerning the origins, nature, and prognosis, of mental illness, and the possibility of a cure through “moral management.” Specifically, I argue that “Julian and Maddalo” interrogates the nosological description of mania and melancholia, by figures like Erasmus Darwin, Nathan Drake, and Philippe Pinel, as dysfunctions of the imagination which are triggered by emotional trauma – and for which poetry can be both, potentially, a symptom and a cure.}},
author = {{Duffy, Cian}},
booktitle = {{The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry}},
editor = {{Roeder, Katrin and Wachter, Cornelia}},
isbn = {{978-90-04-74523-0}},
issn = {{2667-0518}},
language = {{eng}},
pages = {{91--112}},
publisher = {{Brill}},
series = {{Narratives and Mental Health}},
title = {{Madness and Romanticism in Percy Shelley's "Julian and Maddalo"}},
url = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004745247_007}},
doi = {{10.1163/9789004745247_007}},
volume = {{4}},
year = {{2025}},
}