[PDF] Cultural Constructions Of Madness In Eighteenth Century Writing eBook

Author : A. Ingram
Publisher : Springer
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 29,6 MB
Release : 2004-11-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0230510892

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Cultural Constructions of Madness in the Eighteenth Century deals with the (mis)representation of insanity through a substantial range of literary forms and figures from across the eighteenth century and beyond. Chapters cover the representation, distortion, sentimentalization and elevation of insanity, and such associated issues as gender, personal identity, and performance, in some of the best, as well as some of the least, known writers of the period. A selection of visual material, including works by Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, is also discussed. While primarily adopting a literary focus, the work is informed throughout by an alertness to significant issues of medical and psychiatric history.

Author : D. Christopher Gabbard
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 20,73 MB
Release : 2023-05-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1350028924

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18th century philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, 'deformity is opposed, not to beauty, but to the complete, common form. If one of the legs of a man be found shorter than the other, the man is deformed; because there is something wanting to complete the whole idea we form of a man'. During the long 18th century, new ideas from aesthetics and the emerging scientific disciplines of physics, biology and zoology contributed to changing fundamental notions about human form, function and ability. The interrelated concepts of the natural and the beautiful coalesced into a hegemonic ideology of form, one which defined communal standards regarding which aspects of human appearance and ability would be considered typical and socially acceptable and which would not. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of history, literature, culture and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century explores such themes and topics as: atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health.

Author : James Whitehead
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 13,70 MB
Release : 2017-07-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0191053430

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Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?

Author : A. Ingram
Publisher : Springer
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 33,85 MB
Release : 2011-04-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0230306594

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Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

Author : Natalie Roxburgh
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 47,26 MB
Release : 2020-09-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3030535983

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This collection of essays examines the way psychoactive substances are described and discussed within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural texts. Covering several genres, such as novels, poetry, autobiography and non-fiction, individual essays provide insights on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of drug effects of opium, alcohol and many other plant-based substances. Contributors consider both contemporary and recent medical knowledge in order to contextualise and illuminate understandings of how drugs were utilised as stimulants, as relaxants, for pleasure, as pain relievers and for other purposes. Chapters also examine the novelty of experimentations of drugs in conversation with the way literary texts incorporate them, highlighting the importance of literary and cultural texts for addressing ethical questions.

Author : Jenifer Buckley
Publisher : Springer
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 22,38 MB
Release : 2017-07-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3319538357

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This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.

Author : Cian Duffy
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 14,2 MB
Release : 2011-10-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1350308781

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This critical anthology examines the place of the sublime in the cultural history of the late eighteenth century and Romantic period. Traditionally, the sublime has been associated with impressive natural phenomena and has been identified as a narrow aesthetic or philosophical category. Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750-1830: - Recovers a broader context for engagements with, and writing about, the sublime - Offers a selection of texts from a wide range of ostensibly unrelated areas of knowledge which both generate and investigate sublime effects - Considers writings about mountains, money, crowds, the Gothic, the exotic and the human mind - Contextualises and supports the extracts with detailed editorial commentary Also featuring helpful suggestions for further reading, this is an ideal resource for anyone seeking a fresh, up-to-date assessment of the sublime.

Author : Clark Lawlor
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 31,8 MB
Release : 2021-06-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1108368980

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Offering an authoritative and timely account of the relationship between literature and medicine in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a time when most diseases had no cure, this collection provides a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped one another. Covering a period in which both medicine and literature underwent frequent and sometimes radical change, the volume examines the complex mutual construction of these two fields via various perspectives: disability, gender, race, rank, sexuality, the global and colonial, politics, ethics, and the visual. Diseases, fashionable and otherwise, such as Defoe's representation of the plague, feature strongly, as authors argue for the role literary genres play in affecting people's experience of physical and mental illness (and health) across the volume. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.

Author : Clark Lawlor
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 42,23 MB
Release : 2021-06-24
Category : History
ISBN : 1108420869

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Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the eighteenth century.

Author : Robert L. Caserio
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 1006 pages
File Size : 15,45 MB
Release : 2012-01-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1316175103

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The Cambridge History of the English Novel chronicles an ever-changing and developing body of fiction across three centuries. An interwoven narrative of the novel's progress unfolds in more than fifty chapters, charting continuities and innovations of structure, tracing lines of influence in terms of themes and techniques, and showing how greater and lesser authors shape the genre. Pushing beyond the usual period-centered boundaries, the History's emphasis on form reveals the range and depth the novel has achieved in English. This book will be indispensable for research libraries and scholars, but is accessibly written for students. Authoritative, bold and clear, the History raises multiple useful questions for future visions of the invention and re-invention of the novel.