If Madame Bovary's death in Flaubert's 1857 novel marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential unconscious double (capable of expressing the body, and thus also the intimate damage caused by disease) in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Giorgio Pressburger (1937-) and Giuliana Morandini (1938-)) all make use of individual 'infected' or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more (conventionally) dominant narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, a function related to the very nature of narration itself.

When the lights of health go down': Narratives in Negative 1. On the Kristevan Semiotic: Language, Desire and Subjectivity 2. Hidden Voices: Revelatory Female Illness in Italo Svevo's Senilità and La coscienza di Zeno 3. Intimacy in Illness and Silence: Giorgio Pressburger's 'La legge degli spazi bianchi' and 'Vera' 4. Street-haunting': Reclaiming the Semiotic in Giuliana Morandini's Caffè Specchi 5. Clues, Traces and Symptoms of the Intimate: Towards a 'Morellization' of the Ill Voice