Description
Book SynopsisA book on Virginia Woolf that contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. It demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure.
Table of ContentsList of Figures and Illustrations
Introduction
1. "I Owned to Great Egotism":
The Neurotic Model in Woolf Criticism
2. "Never Was Anyone So Tossed Up & Down by the Body As I Am":
The Symptoms of Manic-Depressive Illness
3. "But What Is the Meaning of 'Explained' It?"
Countertransference and Modernism
4. "In Casting Accounts, Never Forget to Begin with the State of the Body":
Genetics and the Stephen Family Linc
5. "How Completely He Satisfied Her Is Proved by the Collapse":
Emblematic Events in Family History
6. "How Immense Must Be the Force of Life":
The Art of Autobiography and Woolf's Bipolar Theory of Being
7. "A Novel Devoted to Influenza":
Reading without Resolution in The Voyqge Out
8. "Does Anybody Know Mr. Flanders?"
Bipolar Cognition and Syncretistic Vision in Jacob's Room
9. "The Sane & the Insane, Side by Side":
The Object-Relations of Self Management in Mrs. Dallollway
10. "It Is Finished":
Ambivalence Resolved, Self Restored in To the Liqhthouse
11. "I Do Not Know Altogether Who I Am":
The Plurality of lntrasubjective Life in The Waves
Epilogue: Science and Subjectivity
Afterword, by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison
Appendix: Virginia Woolf's Mood Swing Chart (1895-1941)
Notes
Works Cited
Index
