Writing mental illness: narrative insurgency and experimental form in British and American women's writing from 1965

Through close textual analysis, I will investigate how experimental British and American women writers from 1965-present disrupt dominant narratives surrounding mental health, critiquing expectations for stories of empathy, recovery, and closure. The texts I will consider, which reject narrative coherence and foreground fragmentation, omission, and ellipsis, offer alternative frameworks for approaching mental illness across disciplines and within mental healthcare provision. Previous study on the topic of women and madness has a canonical realist focus. Analysis of women's writing about mental illness addresses the content over the formal strategies of the writers, thus assessing their writing for its testimonial value rather than its literary sophistication. In light of the growing public attention on mental health in the UK and the USA, an investigation into the variety of mental illness narratives and how women challenge the canonical mimetic focus is of particular social value for re-imagining the diverse experiences of mental illness.