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Laura Hart: 'Madness as a problem for personhood in nineteenth-century Russian literature'

My project explores the extent to which madness in literature is seen as constituting a rupture in the continuity of a character. Its focus is on literary representations of the self, including over time, in order to explore philosophical questions of what constitutes a self, and the criteria that underlie continuities and breaks in selfhood. I will look at how madness has been used to construct or deconstruct a ‘self’ and the implications that this has on the character in question.

I will use the timeline of the evolution of psychiatry in Russia over the nineteenth century to compare the portrayals of madness from various authors in order to see if an advancing medical understanding of madness played a role in the literary depiction of the ‘mad self’. In addition to this, I will impose modern understandings of mental illness onto the literary works to consider whether literature showed a more advanced conception of madness than the medical sphere of the time.

General research interests

I completed my undergraduate degree in French and Russian at the University of Exeter before completing my masters in Russian and East European literature and culture at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº last year. I am a CEELBAS funded PhD candidate at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº SSEES and my general research interests include portrayals of madness and mental illness in literature, particularly within Russian works from the nineteenth century, philosophical theories of the self and portrayals of the self in literature (both Russian and French) as well as the notion of the individual in society.

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