Ross Woodman's Sanity, Madness, Transformation was an adventurous exploration of the links between madness in Romantic writing and modern literary and psychoanalytic theory. Revelation and Knowledge picks up where his previous work left off by tracing the profound connections and gaps between religious and poetic faith in the works of the British Romantic poets. Woodman and Joel Faflak focus on the clash in these authors' works between depth psychology and mysticism in the context of post-Enlightenment crises of belief. They also delve into the treatment of revelation in Romantic poetry, expanding on the concept through nuanced examinations of specific Eastern and Western religious traditions. Revelation and Knowledge showcases Woodman's trademark ability to combine literary criticism with autobiography, resulting in a surprising work that is also uniquely daring.

In Sanity, Madness, Transformation, Ross Woodman offers an extended reflection on the relationship between sanity and madness in Romantic literature. Woodman is one of the field's most distinguished authorities on psychoanalysis and romanticism. Engaging with the works of Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, he argues that madness is essential to the writings of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley, and that it has been likewise fundamental to the emergence of the modern subject in psychoanalysis and literary theory. For Frye, madness threatens humanism, whereas for Derrida its relationship is more complex, and more productive. Both approaches are informed by Freudian and Jungian responses to the psyche, which, in turn, are drawn from an earlier Romantic ambivalence about madness.

This work, which began as a collection of Woodman's essays assembled by colleague Joel Faflak, quickly evolved into a new book that approached Romanticism from an original psychoanalytic perspective by returning madness to its proper place in the creative psyche. "Sanity, Madness, Transformation" is a provocative hybrid of theory, literary criticism, and autobiography and is yet another decisive step in a distinguished academic career.