Full Description
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.
Contents
Chapter 1/Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind, Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier.- Chapter 2/"I Am Not an Angel": Madness and Addiction in Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre, Kate Faber Oestreich.- Chapter 3/ "We Should Go Mad": The Madwoman and Her Nurse, Rachel M. Friars and Brenda Ayres.- Chapter 4/The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen in Laura Fish's Strange Music, Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw.- Chapter 5/"A Necessary Madness": PTSD in Mary Balogh's Survivors' Club Novels, Brenda Ayres.- Chapter 6/Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, "Unwomen," and Femmes Fatales: Nell Lyshon's The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris' Gillespie and I, Eckart Voigts.- Chapter 7/"Dear Holy Sister": Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Marshall Needleman Armintor.- Chapter 8/The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman, Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier.- Chapter 9/ Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Its Adaptation, Barbara Braid.- Chapter 10/Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman and Penny Dreadful, Tim Posada.- Chapter 11/The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC's Sherlock, John C. Murray.- Chapter 12/ Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives, Sarah E. Maier.
