Full Description
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
