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The years 1676 and 1774 marked two turning points in the social and legal treatment of madness in England. In 1676, London’s Bethlehem Hospital expanded in grand new premises, and in 1774 the Madhouses Act attempted to limit confinement of the insane. This study explores almost a century of the English history of madness through the texts of five poets who were considered mentally troubled according to contemporary standards: James Carkesse, Anne Finch, William Collins, Christopher Smart and William Cowper were hospitalized, sequestered or exiled from society. Their works cope with representations of insanity, medical definitions or practices, imputed illness, and the judging eye of the ‘sane other’, shedding new light on the dis/continuities in the notion of madness of this period.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents a non-linear compositional progression, characterised by continual fractures, bifurcations and revisions; the genetic dossier includes pre-compositional notes and works that were never published, such as Epiphanies, A Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero. The genetic analysis of this long process of writing, the documentation of which covers a period of around fourteen years, reveals not only how the Portrait was conceived and composed, but also Joyce's evolution as a writer from the very first evidence of his literary activity. This new perspective on Joyce's mode of composition opens the way to a range of potential interpretations of the individual texts, as well as methodological and theoretical insights regarding genetic criticism.