James Whitehead is a Lecturer in English at the Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. He studied English Language and Literature at Magdalen College Oxford, University College London, and King's College London, where he also held a Wellcome Trust funded postdoctoral fellowship and lectured in English and medical humanities. Dr Whitehead has worked as an editor and library researcher for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and his interests include Romanticism and its afterlives, psychiatry and mental illness in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, and the study of life-writing.

Whitehead makes a compelling case for how the cultural construct of the mad poet has implications well beyond the realm of literary history, standing as a testimony to the impact of Romanticism on modernity. Whitehead's theoretical sophistication, evidenced by his engagement of the legacy of Foucault in particular, as well as his extraordinary erudition and meticulous research, are better experienced than described. The book richly rewards the time a reader invests to it.

• Introduction 1: A Precarious Gift': Classical Traditions and their Romantic Reception 2: 'On the giddy brink': Eighteenth-century Prospects 3: Alienism: Mad-doctoring and the Mad Poet 4: Balaam and Bedlam: Romantic Reviewers and the Rhetoric of Insanity 5: Cases of Poetry: Romantic Biographers and the Origins of Psychobiography 6: Creativity, Genius, and Madness: A Scientific Debate and its Romantic Origins 7: Madness Writing Poetry/Poetry Writing Madness Conclusion: Madness, Modernity, and Romanticism

James Whitehead is a Lecturer in English at the Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. He studied English Language and Literature at Magdalen College Oxford, University College London, and King's College London, where he also held a Wellcome Trust funded postdoctoral fellowship and lectured in English and medical humanities. Dr Whitehead has worked as an editor and library researcher for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and his interests include Romanticism and its afterlives, psychiatry and mental illness in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, and the study of life-writing.

Whitehead makes a compelling case for how the cultural construct of the mad poet has implications well beyond the realm of literary history, standing as a testimony to the impact of Romanticism on modernity. Whitehead's theoretical sophistication, evidenced by his engagement of the legacy of Foucault in particular, as well as his extraordinary erudition and meticulous research, are better experienced than described. The book richly rewards the time a reader invests to it.

• Introduction 1: A Precarious Gift': Classical Traditions and their Romantic Reception 2: 'On the giddy brink': Eighteenth-century Prospects 3: Alienism: Mad-doctoring and the Mad Poet 4: Balaam and Bedlam: Romantic Reviewers and the Rhetoric of Insanity 5: Cases of Poetry: Romantic Biographers and the Origins of Psychobiography 6: Creativity, Genius, and Madness: A Scientific Debate and its Romantic Origins 7: Madness Writing Poetry/Poetry Writing Madness Conclusion: Madness, Modernity, and Romanticism