If madness is among the great themes favored by Western literature, it is because a disturbing link unites their respective languages: madness and literature both emphasize the image of an isolated individual as opposed to the social group, whether you called him hero or anti-hero; both take the attempt to bring order to the chaos of reality to the point of extreme contradiction; both, through the figural system, disrupt the relationship between linguistic sign and referent.

At the same time, cultural history is crossed by a pertinacious attempt to exorcise what we call the loss, and should rather call the mutation of reason. To this end, ancient Greek tragedy shows us the way of the dissociation between nature and fate: madness is not us, it is a hostile god that dispossesses us of our behavior.

In contrast, the great confronting experiences in the early seventeenth century, “King Lear” and “Don Quixote,” make madness the revelation of the authentic self, imagination, humanity and truth. In the nineteenth century, the theme becomes the confrontation ground between man and God, from the irreducible antagonism that stands out in “Moby Dick” and Maupassant’s stories to the integral and paradoxical application of the Christian message in Dostoevsky’s “Idiot” and in “Parsifal.”

«Paduano offers an extremely thick and insightful analysis of the great literary follies between ancient and modern: from the theater of Dionysus to the twentieth century, as the volume’s subtitle states.» Luca Crescenzi, La Repubblica