Revels in madness : insanity in medicine and literature / Allen Thiher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thiher, Allen, 1941-

Series:

Corporealities

Corporealities : discourses of disability

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and mental illness.

Mental illness in literature.

Mental illness--History.

Mental illness.

History.

Psychiatry--History.

Psychiatry.

Physical Description:

354 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [1999]

Summary:

Revels in Madness offers a history of western culture's shifting understandings of insanity as evidenced in its literature and as influenced by medical knowledge. The survey traces the period from the development of Greek medicine, and of Greek tragedy and comedy, to contemporary representations of madness as shaped by modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis and portrayed in literature. It surveys a remarkable range of writers, including Cervantes, Nerval, Rimbaud, Holderin, Charcot, Freud, and Kraepelin.

Conceptions of madness in literature have reflected the cultural assumptions of their era. During medieval times, insanity was viewed as a trial sent by God, while during the nineteenth century, it was seen simply as a sign of degenerate heredity. These two points of view represent a pre-modern and a modern understanding of madness, and the book is organized to emphasize the transition from classical theories of madness to modernity. This transition began at the end of the Enlightenment and culminates in the reactions seen in recent women's writing which challenge the postmodern understanding of madness as a fall from language or as a dysfunction of the cybernetic system that we new define as culture.

This book will interest those intrigued by the relationship between culture, medicine, and literature, both in the history of medicine and literature and in literary depictions of cognitive disabilities. Students of comparative literature or the history of science, as well at doctors, therapists, and those interested in clinical psychology will enjoy reading this book.

Contents:

Madness from Hippocrates to Hølderlin

Discourses on madness in the Greco-Roman world

Continuities and ruptures in Medieval folly

Madness and early modernity in Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Descartes

The iatro-mechanical era and the madness of machines

Neoclassicism, the rise of singularity, and moral treatment

Part the modernity of madness

The German romantics and the invention of psychiatry

Pathological anatomy and the poetics of madness

Modern determinations of insanity: psychiatry and psychoanalysis

Modernist poetic discourse in madness

The contemporary scene's affirmation of and rebellion against logos

Postscript: madness between history and neurology

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [325]-335) and index.

ISBN:

0472110357

OCLC:

41337974