Description
Book SynopsisStarting with Central Europe and concluding with the United States of America, A history of the case study tells the story of the genre as inseparable from the foundation of sexology and psychoanalysis and integral to the history of European literature. It examines the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pioneers of the case study who sought answers to the mysteries of sexual identity and shaped the way we think about sexual modernity. These pioneers include members of professional elites (psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and jurists) and creative writers, writing for newly emerging sexual publics.
Where previous accounts of the case study have approached the history of the genre from a single disciplinary perspective, this book stands out for its interdisciplinary approach, well-suited to negotiating the ambivalent contexts of modernity. It focuses on key formative moments and locations in the genre's past where the conventions of the case study were co
Trade Review
‘A valuable introduction to some lesser-known writers and doctors, and offers tantalising glimpses into national differences within those disciplines that use the case study, and within their historiographies. It is also a useful entry point for those interested in histories of sexology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis or criminology, but unfamiliar with the rich literary world that has surrounded and helped to shape these fields.’
Janet Weston, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Social History of Medicine, vol 33, no 3, August 2018
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Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi and Alison Lewis
1 The shifting case of masochism: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s
Venus im Pelz (1870)
Birgit Lang
2 Fin-de-siècle investigations of the ‘creative genius’ in psychiatry and psychoanalysis
Birgit Lang
3 ‘Writing back’: literary satire and Oskar Panizza’s Psichopatia criminalis (1898)
Birgit Lang
4 Erich Wulffen and the case of the criminal
Birgit Lang
5 Alfred Döblin’s literary cases about women and crime in Weimar Germany
Alison Lewis
6 Viola Bernard and the case study of race in post-war America
Joy Damousi
Conclusion
Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi and Alison Lewis
Select bibliography
Index
