Download or read book Figuring Madness in Nineteenth Century Fiction written by C. Wiesenthal and published by Springer. This book was released on 1997-08-29 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are signs and symptoms of psychic alienation variously enfigured in literary texts? And how do readers invariably figure in some form of the 'madness' they attempt to figure out? These are some of the questions addressed by Figuring Madness , a study which employs the insights of current post-structuralist psychoanalysis and semiotic theory to examine the complex interimplication of the subject and object of madness that is always implied by the dynamics of analytic dia-gnosis. In its focus on the implications of writing and reading signs of madness, the study offers new interpretations of both canonical and non-canonical texts by authors spanning the period from Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James.
Download or read book Figuring Madness microform Nineteenth century Fiction and Semiotic Dimensions of Madness written by Christine Susan Wiesenthal and published by National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. This book was released on 1992 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds written by Mathilde Vialard and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally represented real mental sufferings. This book considers the different mental illnesses the characters of sensation novels develop inside and outside the home as they struggle to define their own identity against Victorian social expectations. It demonstrates how these novels fictionalised the crisis of the leisured upper classes, who spent most of their time at home, and found themselves at odds with a society that increasingly separated the domestic and working environments, while also considering the impact that a lack of a sense of domestic belonging could have on their mental health. Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds further analyses the extent to which domesticity—in its excess or lack—could afflict the mental health of Victorian men and women through the fictional representation of suicidal thoughts and acts in the novels of Braddon and Collins.
Download or read book The Most Dreadful Visitation written by Valerie Pedlar and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The ‘Most Dreadful Visitation.’ This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson’s Maud, Wilkie Collins’s Basil, and Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings—and fears—of mental degeneracy.
Download or read book The Double in Nineteenth Century Fiction written by J. Herdman and published by Springer. This book was released on 1990-06-29 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Duality and the divided mind have been a source of perennial fascination for literary artists and especially for novelists, and this is particularly true of the Romantic generation and their later nineteenth-century heirs. This book deals with the double, or Doppelgnger, as a dominant theme in the fiction of the period, and with its relation to the problem of evil. It suggests that the literary double flourished best when psychological and religious understandings of human dividedness were in harmony, and declined when they began to grow apart. Writers analysed include E.T.A.Hoffmann, James Hogg, Poe, Dostoevsky and Stevenson; the final chapter relates the theme to the psychology of Jung.
Download or read book Madness in Post 1945 British and American Fiction written by C. Baker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and thematic exploration of representations of madness in postwar British and American Fiction, this book is relevant to those with interests in literary studies and is a vital read for psychiatric clinicians and professionals who are interested in how literature can inform and enhance clinical practices.
Download or read book Out of his mind written by Amy Milne-Smith and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of His Mind interrogates how Victorians made sense of the madman as both a social reality and a cultural representation. Even at the height of enthusiasm for the curative powers of nineteenth-century psychiatry, to be certified as a lunatic meant a loss of one’s freedom and in many ways one’s identify. Because men had the most power and authority in Victorian Britain, this also meant they had the most to lose. The madman was often a marginal figure, confined in private homes, hospitals, and asylums. Yet as a cultural phenomenon he loomed large, tapping into broader social anxieties about respectability, masculine self-control, and fears of degeneration. Using a wealth of case notes, press accounts, literature, medical and government reports, this text provides a rich window into public understandings and personal experiences of men’s insanity.
Download or read book Neo Victorian Madness written by Sarah E. Maier and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media investigates contemporary fiction, cinema and television shows set in the Victorian period that depict mad murderers, lunatic doctors, social dis/ease and madhouses as if many Victorians were “mad.” Such portraits demand a “rediagnosing” of mental illness that was often reduced to only female hysteria or a general malaise in nineteenth-century renditions. This collection of essays explores questions of neo-Victorian representations of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches or non-normative imaginings as well as considers the important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility or methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. The chapters investigate the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad rediagnosed by present-day (neo-Victorian) representations informed by post-nineteenth-century psychological insights.
Download or read book Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture written by Lloyd Hughes Davies and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first monograph to consider the significance of madness and irrationality in both Spanish and Spanish American literature. It considers various definitions of ‘madness’ and explores the often contrasting responses, both positive (figural madness as stimulus for literary creativity) and negative (clinical madness representing spiritual confinement and sterility). The concept of national madness is explored with particular reference to Argentina: while, on the one hand, the country’s vast expanses have been seen as conducive to madness, the urban population of Buenos Aires, on the other, appears to be especially dependent on psychoanalytic therapy. The book considers both the work of lesser-known writers such as Nuria Amat, whose personal life is inflected by a form of literary madness, and that of larger literary figures such as José Lezama Lima, whose poetic concepts are suffused with the irrational. The conclusion draws attention to the ‘other side’ of reason as a source of possible originality in a world dominated by the tenets of logic and conventionalised thinking.
Download or read book Romantic Autopsy written by Arden Hegele and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find the fields collaborating to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts.
Download or read book Madness and Confinement in Charlotte Perkins Gilman s The Yellow Wall Paper and Charlotte Bront s Jane Eyre written by Eva Maria Krehl and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2006-09-15 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Literatur, Note: 1,5, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Veranstaltung: Gender: Reading and Writing between Romanticism and the 20th Century, 10 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: A reader of nineteenth century literature by women is bound to encounter a striking coherence of theme and imagery throughout all genres. One of the recurring themes is that of madness and confinement. The often cited “Mad Woman in the Attic,” who is locked away by male authority, appears as a central figure both in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” written in 1890, and Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel Jane Eyre,which was published in 1847. This essay will seek to explore similarities between the two works in respect to their description of madness as an escape from repressive social structures. The mad woman will be discussed as representing a rebellious double to the submissive heroine, who appears to be fragmented and confined by Victorian conventions of propriety. Emphasis will be laid as well on the medical treatment of mental illnesses that both texts deal with. It will be shown that gender-biased medical judgments made by men in both works actually have their origin in subconscious male anxieties.
Download or read book Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic 1837 1871 written by Nicole C. Dittmer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-04-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female “monster” figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siècle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into “wild” and “monstrous” (re)presentations.
Download or read book Sex in Mind written by Rachel Ann Malane and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the novels of Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy, Malane analyzes how these narratives of love, insanity, and tragedy were in dynamic conversation with the prevailing views about the brain."--Jacket.
Download or read book Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women written by Emma Domínguez-Rué and published by Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. This book was released on 2011 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines images of female illness and invalidism as a metaphor of women's position of invisibility in Victorian and fin-de-siecle America, which pervade the fiction of the Virginia writer Ellen Glasgow (Richmond, 1873-1945). The study contends that the author explores the Victorian cult of invalidism to reveal the mechanisms of patriarchy: her novels warn against adhering to its values, since women are moulded to become epitomes of extreme delicacy and selflessness, being ultimately reduced to virtual inexistence. Many times physically incapacitating, Glasgow seems to suggest, the doctrine of female self-effacement always debilitates women's autonomy as human beings. The female invalids in Glasgow's fiction thus operate as uncanny mirrors of the self women become if they adhere to the traditional code of femininity and its adjoining principle of self-sacrifice.
Download or read book Africanizing Knowledge written by Toyin Falola and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly four decades ago, Terence Ranger questioned to what extent African history was actually African, and whether methods and concerns derived from Western historiography were really sufficient tools for researching and narrating African history. Despite a blossoming and branching out of Africanist scholarship in the last twenty years, that question is still haunting. The most prestigious locations for production of African studies are outside Africa itself, and scholars still seek a solution to this paradox. They agree that the ideal solution would be a flowering of institutions of higher learning within Africa which would draw not only Africanist scholars, but also financial resources to the continent. While the focus of this volume is on historical knowledge, the effort to make African scholarship "more African" is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The essays in this volume employ several innovative methods in an effort to study Africa on its own terms. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, "Africanizing African History," offers several diverse methods for bringing distinctly African modes of historical discourse to the foreground in academic historical research. Part 2, "African Creative Expression in Context," presents case studies of African art, literature, music, and poetry. It attempts to strip away the exotic or primitivist aura such topics often accumulate when presented in a foreign setting in order to illuminate the social, historical, and aesthetic contexts in which these works of art were originally produced. Part 3, "Writing about Colonialism," demonstrates that the study of imperialism in Africa remains a springboard for innovative work, which takes familiar ideas about Africa and considers them within new contexts. Part 4, "Scholars and Their Work," critically examines the process of African studies itself, including the roles of scholars in the production of knowledge about Africa. This timely and thoughtful volume will be of interest to African studies scholars and students who are concerned about the ways in which Africanist scholarship might become "more African."
Download or read book Picturing Women s Health written by Ji Won Chung and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection examine women in diverse roles; mother, socialite, prostitute, celebrity, medical practitioner and patient. The wide range of commentators allows a diverse picture of women’s health in this period.
Download or read book Science and Eccentricity written by Victoria Carroll and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the nineteenth century understood their world. This monograph is the first scholarly history of eccentricity. Carroll explores how discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organized social and economic order. She focuses on the self-taught natural philosopher William Martin, the fossilist Thomas Hawkins and the taxidermist Charles Waterton.
