The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions
The eleven essays collected in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions adopt perspectives from a variety of disciplines—history, sociology, music, theater, and literary studies—in order to examine manifestations of and writing about hysteria in Europe during the long eighteenth century. The collection demonstrates not only that hysteria was an important cultural metaphor for the Enlightenment—a fact sometimes obscured by scholarly emphasis on the study of hysteria as a nineteenth and early twentieth-century phenomenon—but also that the period’s writers sometimes considered hysteria a blessing as well as a curse. Implicit in the various arguments of this collection is the suggestion that hysteria might be considered an expression of early modern ambivalence about the emergence of modernity.
Glen Colburn is Associate Professor of English at Morehead State University, in eastern Kentucky. His research interests include the novel and the history of hysteria. He is currently working on a book length study tentatively titled The Age of Hysteria: Medicine, Philosophy, and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
"The book offers a wide-ranging, compelling set of essays on hysteria and hypochondria, the amorphous symptoms of which have been known since the eighteenth century as “the English malady.” As Colburn puts it in his introduction to the volume, the English malady as a subject of scholarly inquiry “invites both serious and playful analysis of the Enlightenment.” Whether taking up the study of music, medical history, or literature, the eleven essays in this book accept the invitation with vigor and humor, providing challenging new insights and provocative analyses."
Devoney Looser, Associate Professor Department of English, University of Missouri-Columbia
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