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

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