Allan Ingram

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.

Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century

The Madhouse of Language

Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century draws together extracts from writing about madness between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, a period that saw a general decline in religious explanations for insanity and a corresponding advance in the professionalization of psychiatry. The book includes extracts from the writings of Johnson, Boswell, Blake and Coleridge.

A Reader

Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century

Joseph Conrad

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.

Selected Literary Criticism and The Shadow-Line

Joanna Fowler

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.

Order in Variety

Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse

Leigh Wetherall Dickson

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.

Fashioning the Unfashionable

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

John Baker

Marion Leclair

This volume explores the notion of the ‘self’ as it was elaborated and expressed by philosophers, novelists, churchmen, poets and diarists in the Enlightenment. The questions raised by the twelve essays and the introduction, explore the unity, diversity and fragility of a recognisably modern self.

Allan Ingram

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