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Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century draws together extracts from writing about madness between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, a period that saw a general decline in religious explanations for insanity and a corresponding advance in the professionalization of psychiatry. The book includes extracts from the writings of Johnson, Boswell, Blake and Coleridge.
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.
How did people view mental health problems in the eighteenth century, and what do the attitudes of ordinary people towards those afflicted tell us about the values of society at that time? Professor Houston draws upon a wide range of contemporary sources, notably asylum documents, and civil and criminal court records, to present unique insights into the issues around madness, including the written and spoken words of sufferers themselves, and the vocabulary associated with insanity. The links between madness and a range of other issues are explored including madness, gender, social status, religion and witchcraft, in addition to the attributed causes of derangement such as heredity and alcohol abuse. This is a detailed yet profoundly humane and compassionate study of the everyday experiences of those suffering mental impairments ranging from idiocy to lunacy, and an exploration into the meaning of this for society in the eighteenth century.
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research on the Gothic Revival. The Gothic Revival was based on emotion rather than reason and when Horace Walpole created Strawberry Hill House, a gleaming white castle on the banks of the Thames, he had to create new words to describe the experience of gothic lifestyle. Nevertheless, Walpole’s house produced nightmares and his book The Castle of Otranto was the first truly gothic novel, with supernatural, sensational and Shakespearean elements challenging the emergent fiction of social relationships. The novel’s themes of violence, tragedy, death, imprisonment, castle battlements, dungeons, fair maidens, secrets, ghosts and prophecies led to a new genre encompassing prose, theatre, poetry and painting, whilst opening up a whole world of imagination for entrepreneurial female writers such as Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie and Ann Radcliffe, whose immensely popular books led to the intense inner landscapes of the Bronte sisters. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk created a new gothic: atheistic, decadent, perverse, necrophilic and hellish. The social upheaval of the French Revolution and the emergence of the Romantic movement with its more intense (and often) atheistic self-absorption led the gothic into darker corners of human experience with a greater emphasis on the inner life, hallucination, delusion, drug addiction, mental instability, perversion and death and the emerging science of psychology. The intensity of the German experience led to an emphasis on doubles and schizophrenic behaviour, ghosts, spirits, mesmerism, the occult and hell. This volume charts the origins of this major shift in social perceptions and completes a trilogy of Palgrave Handbooks on the Gothic—combined they provide an exhaustive survey of current research in Gothic studies, a go-to for students and researchers alike.
Often, our most fascinating ancestors are those on society’s margins. They might have been discriminated against due to personal misfortune, or have been a victim of society’s fear of difference. You may have ancestors who were poor, or sick, illegitimate, or lawbreakers. Were your family stigmatised because of their ethnicity? Perhaps they struggled with alcoholism, were prostitutes, or were accused of witchcraft. This book will help you find out more about them and the times in which they lived. The nature of this book means that it deals with subjects that can make uncomfortable reading but it is important to confront these issues as we try to understand our ancestors and the society that led to them becoming marginalised. In Tracing your Marginalised Ancestors, you will find plenty of suggestions to help you uncover the stories of these, often elusive, groups of people. Will you accept the challenge to seek out your marginalised ancestors and tell their stories?
Dangerous Motherhood is the first study of the close and complex relationship between mental disorder and childbirth. Exploring the relationship between women, their families and their doctors reveals how explanations for the onset of puerperal insanity were drawn from a broad set of moral, social and environmental frameworks, rather than being bound to ideas that women as a whole were likely to be vulnerable to mental illness. The horror of this devastating disorder which upturned the household, turned gentle mothers into disruptive and dangerous mad women, was magnified by it occurring at a time when it was anticipated that women would be most happy in the fulfillment of their role as mothers.
This volume reproduces primary texts which embody the polymathic nature of the literature of science, and provides editorial overviews and extensive references, to provide a resource for specialized academics and researchers with a broad cultural interest in the long 18th century.
This book traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on visual images of idiocy and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Martin Halliwell provides a lively and detailed discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are much too narrow. With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, this book offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its distinctive place at the intersection of science and culture.
Depression is an experience known to millions. But arguments rage on aspects of its definition and its impact on societies present and past: do drugs work, or are they merely placebos? Is the depression we have today merely a construct of the pharmaceutical industry? Is depression under- or over-diagnosed? Should we be paying for expensive 'talking cure' treatments like psychoanalysis or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? Here, Clark Lawlor argues that understanding the history of depression is important to understanding its present conflicted status and definition. While it is true that our modern understanding of the word 'depression' was formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the condition was originally known as melancholia, and characterised by core symptoms of chronic causeless sadness and fear. Beginning in the Classical period, and moving on to the present, Lawlor shows both continuities and discontinuities in the understanding of what we now call depression, and in the way it has been represented in literature and art. Different cultures defined and constructed melancholy and depression in ways sometimes so different as to be almost unrecognisable. Even the present is still a dynamic history, in the sense that the 'new' form of depression, defined in the 1980s and treated by drugs like Prozac, is under attack by many theories that reject the biomedical model and demand a more humanistic idea of depression - one that perhaps returns us to a form of melancholy.
Despite emancipation from the evils of enslavement in 1838, most people of African origin in the British West Indian colonies continued to suffer serious material deprivation and racial oppression. This book examines the management and treatment of those who became insane, in the period until the Great War.