Thoughts Painfully Intense: Hawthorne and the Invalid Author

ISBN-13: 9780415937856 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 164 str.

Jim Mancall; James N. Mancall;Mancall James

Opis

Thoughts Painfully Intense reads Hawthorne's fiction in the context of 19th-century medical and pseudomedical discourse. Many physicians, health reformers and lecturers, such as Chandler Robbins, Sylvester Graham, William Sweetster and Isaac Ray, believed that authors and scholars, particularly male authors and scholars, were vulnerable to nervous irritability, breakdown and paralysis. According to these authorities, men of letters, strained by intense study or lost in imaginative fantasies, became debilitated invalids. And, what was perhaps even more alarming, this debility could be contagious. Sensational or corrupt literature contained noxious ideas and images. These ideas and images, sometimes clothed in seemingly rational and reliable language, had the power to pollute and corrupt unwary readers.

Spis treści

Introduction; Chapter 1 Fanshawe, the Alma Mater, and the Invalid Author; Chapter 2 Tremulous Hands and Devil’s Claws; Chapter 3 Pure Hands and Witchcraft; Chapter 4 Out of Dream-Land; Chapter 5 Secret Histories and Silences; Chapter 6 Haunted Quacks and Neutral Territories;

O autorze

James N. Mancall