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.

This work deals with the (mis)representation of insanity through a substantial range of literary forms and figures from across the eighteenth century and beyond. Chapters cover the representation, distortion, sentimentalization and elevation of insanity, and such associated issues as gender, personal identity, and performance, in some of the best and least known writers of the period. A selection of visual material, including works by Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, is also discussed. While primarily adopting a literary focus, the work is informed throughout by an alertness to significant...

Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

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.

This collection of essays reassesses the importance of verse as a medium in the long eighteenth century, and as an invitation for readers to explore many of the less familiar figures dealt with, alongside the received names of the standard criticism of the period.

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...