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There is little doubt that this volume deserves to become a landmark in the scholarly study of insanity. The sheer breadth of its scope and the extensiveness of its documentation render it an indispensable reference for students and constitute an achievement of scholarship that should make the volume required for serious reading and contemplation by all those interested in understanding the experiences of insanity. Indeed, Madness and Modernism, which is both a tenaciously presented argument and a richly rewarding compendium on insanity in relation to recent cultural developments, is a treasure that almost buries itself beneath the weightiness of its extraordinary erudition. This is a landmark that risks underappreciation. So I intend here to show why the book is so valuable, and then—because the invitation for me to write this review was issued on the basis of my holding some rather divergent views of the issues expounded in it—I shall raise some questions about certain aspects of Sass's thesis.
In so many ways, what Sass sets out to do, he does superbly. He asks whether madness might be “not an escape from but an exacerbation of that thoroughgoing illness” that Dostoevski described as too much consciousness—what if it were to derive from “a heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness” (p. 4). Oriented toward what he calls “understanding rather than explanation,” Sass adeptly proceeds “to