The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations : Middle Ages to the Present / edited by Katrin Röder and Cornelia Wächter.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Röder, Katrin, editor.

Wächter, Cornelia, editor.

Series:

Literature and Cultural Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2026.

Narratives and Mental Health ; 4.

Literature and Cultural Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2026

Narratives and Mental Health ; 4

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychiatry in literature.

Mental illness in literature.

Literature and Cultural Studies.

Social sciences.

Genre:

Literary criticism

Essays

Physical Description:

1 online resource (370 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Middle Ages to the Present

Place of Publication:

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2025.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This volume investigates the role of English, British, Irish, American, Canadian and Nigerian anglophone literary conceptualizations of mental and social distress, its diagnosis and treatment as transformative parts of the cultural heritage of psychiatry. Demonstrating that the history of psychiatry is not a narrative of unbridled, unequivocal progress, the volume explores how literary texts negotiate and critique dominant and alternative forms and traditions of treatment and care, how they challenge the medicalization of non-normative thoughts and behaviour and how they bear witness to and fragmentarily retrieve and imagine suppressed voices, thereby producing counter-cultural memories.

Contents:

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Katrin Röder and Cornelia Wächter

1 Corrupted Feelings: Emotions and Mental Health in Medieval Religious Texts

Daniel McCann

2 Madness, Polemic and Compassion: the Stigmatisation of Spiritual Affliction in the Life-writings of Dionys Fitzherbert

Paula Barros

3 Madhouses, Female ‘Madness’ and Forms of Caring in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria and Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher

Katrin Röder

4 William Godwin’s Mandeville , Madness and the Case for/against Moral Management

Gerold Sedlmayr

5 Madness and Romanticism in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo”

Cian Duffy

6 “This my hostile body”: Therapy and Mental Pathology in the Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Joseph Crawford

7 Beyond the Disease Paradigm of Drug Use: De Quincey’s Opium-Eating as Self-Medication

Martina Allen

8 Fact or Fiction? Dissociative Identity Disorder, Narrative, and the Agency Afforded by Integration

Naomi Rokotnitz

9 “The eloquence of the locks and bars”

Confinement as Metaphor in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century British and American Literary Representations of Mental Illness

Roman Bischof-Vegh

10 Anti-Psychiatry Heritage and the Publication of Phoenix Rising in Toronto, Canada, 1980–1990

Geoffrey Reaume

11 “Against the assault of withering truth”

Inconvenient Women and Co-Constructed Memory in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture

Maren Scheurer

12 Multiple Psychiatries: Re-Membering Psychiatry in Contemporary Anglophone Novels

Christina Slopek-Hauff

13 Where the “mad woman” Meets the “Club Van Gogh”: Claiming Cultural Heritage while Defying Damaging (Stereo)Typification

Anne Rüggemeier

14 The Psychotropic Revolution in the Light of Feminist and Queer Interventions

Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost and Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression

Eveline Kilian

15 Diagnostic Rhythms: Empathy and Pathology in Green’s My Alien Self

Sandra Marzinkowski

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Röder, Katrin The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

ISBN:

9789004745247

OCLC:

1553137230

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004745247 DOI