Allan Ingram – författare

Language has always been used as a measure of social, ideological, and psychological contexts for the exploration of madness. The Madhouse of Language considers the relations between madness and language from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the close analysis of both medical records and texts by mad writers. It presents a highly original account of the linguistic relations between madness and sanity, of the appropriation by sane writers of the forms of English, and of attempts by mad patients to gain access to the expressive potential of language.

Language has always been used as a measure of social, ideological, and psychological contexts for the exploration of madness. The Madhouse of Language considers the relations between madness and language from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the close analysis of both medical records and texts by mad writers. It presents a highly original account of the linguistic relations between madness and sanity, of the appropriation by sane writers of the forms of English, and of attempts by mad patients to gain access to the expressive potential of language.

First Published in 1986. On 22 January 1910, after two years’ work on what he had intended as a break from Chance, Conrad finally finished the manuscript of Under Western Eyes. It had been begun, like many of his novels, as a short story, to be called simply ‘Razumov’, in which he would try ‘to capture the very soul of things Russian’ (Jean-Aubry, 1927, II, p. 64). Some 130,000 words later, Conrad was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. This is a collection of correspondence, biography and writing on Joseph Conrad’s work.

First Published in 1986. On 22 January 1910, after two years’ work on what he had intended as a break from Chance, Conrad finally finished the manuscript of Under Western Eyes. It had been begun, like many of his novels, as a short story, to be called simply ‘Razumov’, in which he would try ‘to capture the very soul of things Russian’ (Jean-Aubry, 1927, II, p. 64). Some 130,000 words later, Conrad was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. This is a collection of correspondence, biography and writing on Joseph Conrad’s work.

This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples – ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases – as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends.

These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation.