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Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media investigates contemporary fiction, cinema and television shows set in the Victorian period that depict mad murderers, lunatic doctors, social dis/ease and madhouses as if many Victorians were "mad." Such portraits demand a "rediagnosing" of mental illness that was often reduced to only female hysteria or a general malaise in nineteenth-century renditions. This collection of essays explores questions of neo-Victorian representations of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches or non-normative imaginings as well as considers the important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility or methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. The chapters investigate the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad rediagnosed by present-day (neo-Victorian) representations informed by post-nineteenth-century psychological insights.
List of contents
Chapter 1/Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind, Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier.- Chapter 2/"I Am Not an Angel": Madness and Addiction in Neo-Victorian Appropriations of Jane Eyre, Kate Faber Oestreich.- Chapter 3/ "We Should Go Mad": The Madwoman and Her Nurse, Rachel M. Friars and Brenda Ayres.- Chapter 4/The Daughters of Bertha Mason: Caribbean Madwomen in Laura Fish's Strange Music, Olivia Tjon-A-Meeuw.- Chapter 5/"A Necessary Madness": PTSD in Mary Balogh's Survivors' Club Novels, Brenda Ayres.- Chapter 6/Unreliable Neo-Victorian Narrators, "Unwomen," and Femmes Fatales: Nell Lyshon's The Colour of Milk and Jane Harris' Gillespie and I, Eckart Voigts.- Chapter 7/"Dear Holy Sister": Narrating Madness, Bodily Horror and Religious Ecstasy in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Marshall Needleman Armintor.- Chapter 8/The Unmentionable Madness of Being a Woman, Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier.- Chapter 9/ Queering the Madwoman: A Mad/Queer Narrative in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Its Adaptation, Barbara Braid.- Chapter 10/Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman and Penny Dreadful, Tim Posada.- Chapter 11/The Glamorisation of Mental Illness in BBC's Sherlock, John C. Murray.- Chapter 12/ Gendered (De)Illusions: Imaginative Madness in Neo-Victorian Childhood Trauma Narratives, Sarah E. Maier.
About the author
Sarah E. Maier is
Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, Canada.
Brenda Ayres teaches online courses for Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire University, USA.
Maier and Ayres have coedited several collections of essays. The most recent are
Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020),
Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019) and
Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-first Century (2019).
Report
"The volume ... offers a good overview of the different shapes Neo-Victorian engagements with madness can take, a thorough exploration of Victorian mental-health-related medical discourses and some very strong individual contributions." (Anne Reus, The Wilkie Collins Journal, wilkiecollinssociety.org, Vol. 18, 2021)
