This chapter shows that even before Samuel Richardson made the revisions he did to the third edition of Clarissa, there was already a baroque strain in the final instalment pulling of the novel towards a self-defeatingly convoluted ideal of scholarly order. It considers the Denis Diderot's fantasy of finding Richardson's novels collapsed and scattered into bare letters and perhaps this is a more apt image of the novel than Diderot knew. The chapter argues that the broken and the mournful landscape of Clarissa after the rape shares the ambivalent impulses that Walter Benjamin associates with the tragic drama of the German seventeenth century. Through the lens of Benjamin, William Hogarth's Tail Piece can be understood in line with Melencolia 1 as an allegory for a certain kind of allegorical reading itself.

This chapter builds on Terry Castle's insights that the first instalment of Clarissa is dominated by the linguistic persecutions imposed on Clarissa by the Harlowes in a manner that anticipates the violence that is done to her by Lovelace. It shows that the Harlowes' bullying attempt to force compliance from the intransigent youngest daughter provides Samuel Richardson with an opportunity to show his idea of the received notion in action. Richardson himself seems to share Anna Laetitia Barbauld's initial faith in the potential Clarissa's account has to provide, an ideal counter-discourse to the other malformed and conflicting rival accounts developing at the novel's margins. The chapter then turns to Lovelace and the rakes, whose libertine behaviour is represented by Richardson as being less a spontaneous acting upon animal urges than a carefully structured set of behaviours enacted in accordance with certain maxims.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book suggests that Samuel Richardson's claim that he wrote Clarissa to challenge his public's faith in a 'dangerous but too commonly received notion' that is structurally related to its tragedy. It argues that the novel explores a quite flexible and varied idea of what a 'received notion' might be whether a rumour or the inversely moral maxims. The book shows, from the perspectives of Clarissa and Lovelace respectively, how preoccupied the novel becomes with the limits of the quotational forms of authority, specifically at the caesural juncture of the rape. It draws on Walter Benjamin's vocabulary for describing the baroque to examine the accelerated half-life of the received notions. The book also shows that Clarissa dies amid her and Lovelace's completely different understanding of the meaning of a single letter.

This chapter argues that Samuel Richardson seems to become more interested in such second stories when things are getting particularly fraught in the main 'first' one. It considers the relationship between Clarissa's mad papers and Lovelace's claim that he is unable to speak, write or think effectively on encountering Clarissa after the rape. Like Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison has at its centre an instance of female madness. The chapter then considers the possibility that Richardson represents in Lovelace a similar fantasy of healing, repair and making reparation to the other to that found in the Kleinian therapy. Lovelace's inability to transcribe Clarissa's writings and subsequent inability to speak or think properly when he encounters her in person are attributable to what Melanie Klein would call 'his fears of having destroyed the object'.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines an understanding of tragedy based on the theories and explains how authors use them to understand Samuel Richardson's practice of tragedy in Clarissa. It concerns Richardson's representation of the dynamics of the 'received notion', the constituting mechanism of public knowledge that he says he wrote the novel to contest. The book takes up the novel on the other side of its major caesural moment, Lovelace's rape of Clarissa, and investigates the remarkable set of fragmentary texts, or 'mad papers'. It argues that it is Clarissa's antigone-like resistance to his attempts to reverse that tragedy that drives the latter stages of the novel. The book also shows the relevance of Walter Benjamin's analysis of the baroque to Clarissa's long approach to death.

Leonid Andreev’s rise to literary fame reached dizzying heights in a short amount of time. There were, unquestionably, many factors that contributed to his success. Yet, this chapter mainly concentrates on the development of Andreev’s particular illness narrative and how it contributed to the author’s cultural relevancy. Stories about sexual deviance and criminal madness propelled Andreev beyond literary discussions and into larger debates about the health of the Russian nation. His works were used by scientists, journalists and scholars alike to support arguments of all colors and stripes, but the most important being that Andreev was representative of a society under duress, suffering from the rapid and disorienting pace of modernization.

As with most scholarly works on Leonid Andreev, we will begin with his birth and childhood, but where this study strikes a different cord is when we begin to examine Andreev’s adolescent diaries, which provide a personalized narrative of illness. Attention is given to Andreev’s illness narrative in order to suggest that melancholic episodes were the impetus for much of his abnormal behaviour. Recognizing the strong impact that bouts of melancholy had on Andreev’s personal life and literary output opens up nuanced moments of imbedded autobiography in his texts, which were enacted as a type of creative therapy, and provide a means for contextualizing the theme of madness in Andreev’s literary works.

In June 1904, newspaper Courier ceased to exist after a prolonged period of financial difficulties. This meant that Andreev now had to earn his livelihood solely as a creative writer. The heady times of his initial success gave way to a period of significant political upheaval and personal loss. Andreev’s life was turned upside down by the deaths of both his youngest sister and his wife, while his works began to reflect his own political ruminations, if not vacillations. This chapter concentrates on the ways in which madness interacts with Andreev’s personal and fictional narratives of loss and rebellion. The central focus is the period 1904–08, although many of the sections in this chapter are organized thematically rather than in strict chronological order.

For most of 1912-13, Andreev suffered from constant migraines, insomnia and a pain in his arm. Finally in 1914, he decided to go to Rome with his wife Anna and their son Savva to convalesce. The final act of Andreev’s life was one of failing health and diminished artistic abilities. These problems were complicated further by war and revolution, which monopolized a great amount of Andreev’s attention. This chapter concentrates on the author’s Finnish diary, where the illness experience is once again at the fore, as well as Andreev’s own pursuit of treatment. As noted at the beginning of this study, if we examine Andreev’s narrative of illness from adolescent diary, through his literary works, to his final Finnish entries, we gain perspective on how neurasthenia influenced the author’s life and works.

As Andreev began to rebuild his life around his new family in Vammelsuu, various ideas from his earlier works started to coalesce in coherent and consistent ways. In dramatic and literary works of this period the performance is a way of interacting with madness in an attempt to hide its effects from the public, because there exists the threat of incarceration for those deemed abnormal or dangerous (including the insane), therefore verisimilitude (giving a truth that the public wants to see) is necessary to avoid the stigma of madness. In this chapter, I argue that by maintaining the appearance of normalcy, Andreev wished to avoid the criticism à la Max Nordau that the author was as morally corrupt as his decadent works of art.