Symptoms of Disorder

"This book offers new insights into the representation of madness in British literature between two landmark dates for the social, philosophical and medical history of mental deviance: 1744 and 1845. In 1744, the Vagrancy Act first mentions 'lunatics' as a specific category, which is itself a social 'symptom' of an emerging need for isolation and confinement of the insane. A more sophisticated and attentive care of the 'fool' is testified only by the 1845 Lunatic Asylums Act, which established specific processes safeguarding against the wrongful detention of patients in public and private facilities. In stressing for the first time the momentous change the notion of madness underwent between these years, this book provides a fresh and absolutely unique perspective on some of the major works connected with mental disorder. The chronological boundaries also provide the collection with a definite and unifying frame, which comprises social, cultural, legal and medical aspects of madness as an historical phenomenon. It is within this frame that the eight essays composing the body of the book discuss how madness is recounted, or even experienced, by authors such as Christopher Smart and William Cowper, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thomas Perceval, Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Eliza Haywood, and Alfred Tennyson."--