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Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, this volume argues that many well-known literary texts evoke a similar psychological state.
List of contents
Part 1AutobiographicalChapter 1
Land Without Feelings: A Depersonalization Memoir
Part 2PsychologicalChapter 2
Like Looking in Fairyland: The History and Pathology of Depersonalization
Chapter 3
The Sound a Noise Makes when it Ceases: The Literature of Depersonalization
Chapter 4
Making the Stone Stony: Depersonalization in Literary Theory
Part 3PracticalChapter 5
A Moonlit Interval: Showing and Telling in Fiction
Chapter 6
The Odour of a Rose: Showing and Telling in Poetry
Chapter 7
Crossing the Threshold: Quests, Epiphanies, Liminality
About the author
Matthew Francis is Professor of Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, UK. He has published six poetry collections with Faber & Faber, most recently
Wing (2020). He is also the author of two novels,
WHOM (Bloomsbury, 1989) and
The Book of the Needle (Cinnamon Press, 2014), and a collection of short stories,
Singing a Man to Death (Cinnamon Press, 2012). He has edited the poems of W.S. Graham for Faber and published a study of Graham,
Where the People Are (Salt Publishing, 2005).
Summary
Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, this volume argues that many well-known literary texts evoke a similar psychological state.
