The Affective Disorder and the Writing Life : The Melancholic Muse

Affective Disorder and the Writing Life interrogates the mythos of the 'mad writer' through lived experience, literary analysis, writerly reflection and contemporary neuroscience. It explores how affective disorders colour, drive and sometimes silence the writing mind – and how affective difference has always informed the literary imagination.

How does affective madness influence the social understanding of writers and other artists, or shape the creative act itself? In a 15-year longitudinal study at the Iowa Writers'' Workshop, a study little known outside of psychiatry, 80 per cent of the writers reported either living with, or having had a lifetime incidence of, an affective disorder (depression or manic depression), as opposed to only 30 per cent of non-writer controls. Affective Disorder and the Writing Life interrogates the age-old mythos of the ''mad writer'' through lived experience, literary analysis, writerly reflection, and contemporary neuroscience. These essays explore how affective disorders colour, drive and sometimes silence the writing mind - and how affective difference has always informed the literary imagination.