Description
Book SynopsisHow the insane asylum came to exert such a powerful hold on the American imagination. Madhouse, funny farm, psychiatric hospital, loony bin, nuthouse, mental institution: no matter what you call it, the asylum has a powerful hold on the American imagination. Stark and foreboding, they symbolize mistreatment, fear, and imprisonment, standing as castles of despair and tyranny across the countryside. In the asylum of American fiction and film, treatments are torture, attendants are thugs, and psychiatrists are despots. In Nightmare Factories, Troy Rondinone offers the first history of mental hospitals in American popular culture. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 short story The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, Rondinone surveys how American novelists, poets, memoirists, reporters, and filmmakers have portrayed the asylum and how those representations reflect larger social trends in the United States. Asylums, he argues, darkly reflect cultural anxieties and the shortcomings of
Trade ReviewWill appeal to a broad range of readers, from academics interested in the history of medicine and popular culture, to general readers seeking social history rooted in an imaginative variety of sources.
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Library JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. The Enchanter's Castle
Chapter 2: Woman in White, Angel in Black
Chapter 3: Monsters of the Asylum
Chapter 4: Freudian Rescues
Chapter 5: The Dawning Age of Paranoia
Chapter 6: They're Coming to Take You Away
Chapter 7: The Asylum Next Door
Chapter 8: Asylums Don't Work
Chapter 9: Breakout
Chapter 10: Standardization
Chapter 11: Return of the Gothic
Epilogue: Real Horrors
Notes
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