Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism through an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie.
This book argues that these early Romantic-period novelists revised medical and popular sentimental models for female madness that made inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body responsible for women's mental afflictions. The book explores how the more radical authors
Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and Hays
blamed men and patriarchal structures of control for their characters' hysteria and melancholia, while the more mainstream writers
Edgeworth and Opie
located causality in less gendered and less victimised accounts. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary criticism.
By:
Deborah Weiss Imprint: Manchester University Press Country of Publication: United Kingdom Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 16mm
Weight: 527g ISBN:9781526175717 ISBN 10: 1526175711 Pages: 288 Publication Date:01 December 2024 Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: Active
Deborah Weiss is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama.
