Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2012. What are we to make of madness in contemporary times? Are we to study its various facets, following the traditional path? Or should we turn towards a less explored territory? Madness in Plural Contexts: Crossing Borders, Linking Knowledge represents a decisive turn towards the social and cultural in contemporary understandings of madness. While it retains a focus on the diagnosis and interpretation of madness, it focuses on mad identities in literature and the media. It shows that the boundaries between the psychiatric/psychological and the social/cultural are blurred. Madness appears on stage fuelled by absinthe, across pages of novels, detective TV shows and philosophical and theoretical dialogues. It continues to be haunted by religious connotations, while becoming a subtext of social exclusion in contested cultural geographies. Madness becomes the rhythm of human life in the face of late modernity’s unquenchable thirst for perfection, success and progress.