The Most Dreadful Visitation

Male Madness in Victorian Fiction

AvValerie Pedlar

Inbunden, Engelska, 2006

Del 46 i serien Liverpool English Texts and Studies

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Beskrivning

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The ‘Most Dreadful Visitation.’ This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson’s Maud, Wilkie Collins’s Basil, and Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings—and fears—of mental degeneracy.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2006-11-01
Mått:163 x 239 x undefined mm
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Liverpool English Texts and Studies
Antal sidor:192
Förlag:Liverpool University Press
ISBN:9780853238393

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Mer om författaren

Valerie Pedlar teaches at the Open University in Manchester. She has contributed to a number of publications including 'The Nineteenth Century Novels: Identities' (ed. Dennis Walder Routledge 2001.)

Recensioner i media

In The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction Valerie Pedlar looks at the treatment of "fears, insecurities and ambiguities concerning the state of manhood" in representations of male insanity (pp.1-2). Pedlar pursues her topics-idiocy, erotic frustration, wrongful confinement, madness in marriage degeneracy-across a wide range of texts, some of them familiar (by Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, Bram Stoker) and some not (Ellen Wood's Martin's Eve, Eliza Lynn Linton's Sowing the Wind, Henry Cockton's The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist). Pedlar's study complements-and in some aspects corrects-the preoccupation with madness as a female condition in recent historicist studies. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The Nineteenth Century Volume 50, Number 4

Innehållsförteckning

AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Insurrection and Imagination: Idiocy and Barnaby Rudge2. Thwarted Lovers: Basil and Maud3. Wrongful Confinement, Sensationalism and Hard Cash4. Madness and Marriage5. The Zoophagus Maniac: Madness and Degeneracy in DraculaConclusionBibliographyIndex