Love's madness : medicine, the novel, and female insanity, 1800-1865

Resource Information

The work Love's madness : medicine, the novel, and female insanity, 1800-1865 represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Love's madness : medicine, the novel, and female insanity, 1800-1865

Title remainder

medicine, the novel, and female insanity, 1800-1865

Statement of responsibility

Helen Small

Creator

• Small, Helen

Subject

• English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• History
• Literature and medicine -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Literature and mental illness -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Loss (Psychology) in literature
• Love
• Love in literature
• Medical fiction -- History and criticism
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Medicine in literature
• Mental Disorders
• Mentally ill women in literature
• Women -- psychology
• Women and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Medicine in Literature

Genre

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

• Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, Helen Small presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, about femininity, and about narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, but Small also brings out the historical and literary interest of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others
• Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters, and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. Love's Madness traces the fortunes of love-mad women in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865. In literary terms, these dates demarcate the period between the decline of sentimentalism and the emergence of sensation fiction. In medical terms, they mark out a key stage in the history of insanity, beginning with major reform initiatives and ending with the establishment in 1865 of the Medico-Psychological Association
• This original and highly readable study challenges previous assumptions about the relationship between medicine and the novel. A major addition to nineteenth-century studies, it will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, feminism, social history, and the history of medicine

Cataloging source

DLC

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PR868.M46

LC item number

S63 1996

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography