From ancient stories of divine possession and ecstatic vision to Shakespearean unravelings and nineteenth-century asylum narratives, madness has long functioned as a lens through which authors probe the limits of reason, identity, and social order. These works have shaped how we read instability, delusion, rupture, and rapture in literary texts. This volume examines some of the visible manifestations of madness, while revealing the pressures that accumulate, the ideologies that control, the griefs that undo, and the systems that produce instability.