This book examines Italo Svevo, Giorgio Pressburger and Giuliana Morandini, all make use of individual 'infected' or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness, silence and identity to cast doubt on a more dominant narrative standpoint.

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.