Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society.
Trade ReviewIn The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction Valerie Pedlar looks at the treatment of "fears, insecurities and ambiguities concerning the state of manhood" in representations of male insanity (pp.1-2). Pedlar pursues her topics-idiocy, erotic frustration, wrongful confinement, madness in marriage degeneracy-across a wide range of texts, some of them familiar (by Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, Bram Stoker) and some not (Ellen Wood's Martin's Eve, Eliza Lynn Linton's Sowing the Wind, Henry Cockton's The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist). Pedlar's study complements-and in some aspects corrects-the preoccupation with madness as a female condition in recent historicist studies. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The Nineteenth Century Volume 50, Number 4
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1. Insurrection and Imagination: Idiocy and Barnaby Rudge
- 2. Thwarted Lovers: Basil and Maud
- 3. Wrongful Confinement, Sensationalism and Hard Cash
- 4. Madness and Marriage
- 5. The Zoophagus Maniac: Madness and Degeneracy in Dracula
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
