Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth Century Writing
Representing the Insane
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Pope’s Homer, and especially his Iliad, was the foundation stone of his poetic reputation and, as is well known, of both his personal financial security and of the degree of independence he was thereafter able to...
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‘Cowper came to me’, wrote William Blake in around 1819, nearly twenty years after the earlier poet’s death,
and said “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insan...
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In the eighteenth century, the realm of madness was a locus of intensity in terms of the perception of women. Characteristics that were attributed to women multiplied in degree when madness was on the horizon....
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The search for ‘madness itself’, for ‘really’ knowing what madness is, or was, or will be, for the ‘truly insane’, in language, in appearance, in art, in behaviour, or for what I refer to earlier as ‘the whole...
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The history of insanity is full of dizzying paradoxes. Here, for example, is the nineteenth-century madhouse proprietor Thomas Bakewell, writing in 1815: ‘Inever sit at table’, he observes, ‘without a number o...
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In reconstructing Homer’s Achilles, Pope not only wrote his own way out of a tricky moral dilemma, one that had the capacity to unsteady an entire neoclassical culture. He also created a model in which the men...
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In the sixth book of Tom Jones, Squire Western, being suddenly made aware of the true relationship between Tom and his daughter Sophia, and realising that he has himself just sent Tom for a private interview with...
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Thus we prattled away our time till we came in sight of a noble pile of building, which diverted us from our former discourse, and gave my friend the occasion of asking me my thoughts ...
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Such recent works as Frederick Burwick’s Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, Jennifer Ford’s Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination, David Vallins’s Coleridge and the Psyc...
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In his chapter for Northrop Frye’s Romanticism Reconsidered, published nearly fifty years ago, Lionel Trilling stresses the centrality of pleasure to definitions of Romantic aesthetics, beginning with Wordsworth’...
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Since G. S. Rousseau proposed the link between nerve theory and the literature of sentiment in his groundbreaking article from 1976, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” a.....
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‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. The famous opening sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) has contributed to the writer’s image as one of the most influential defenders...
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The conclusion confirms the historical significance of the newly discovered Sharp manuscript at the British Library, arguing that it reminds us of Sharp’s importance for the abolition movement and provides vit...
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The introduction details the circumstances of my discovery of Granville Sharp’s letter in the British Library, provides evidence that the British Library did not know of its presence there, and establishes the...
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This chapter details the complex, difficult investigation into the provenance of the British Library document and provides the first examination of the relationship between different pieces of primary evidence...
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This chapter shows how Sharp’s letter to the Admiralty came to be lost in the British Library by tracing its path through the libraries of two private collectors, the British Museum, and finally the British Li...