Book Cover
E-book
Author Reiss, Benjamin.

Title Theaters of madness : insane asylums and nineteenth-century American culture / Benjamin Reiss
Published Chicago : University of Chicago Press, ©2008

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 237 pages) : illustrations
Contents Introduction: sanative culture -- Brothers and sisters of asylumia: literary life in the New York State Lunatic Asylum -- Saneface minstrelsy: blacking up in the asylum -- Bardolatry in Bedlam: Shakespeare and early psychiatry -- Emerson's close encounters with madness -- What's the point of a revolution?: Edgar Allan Poe and the origins of the asylum -- Out of the attic: gender, captivity, and asylum exposés
Summary In the mid-1800s a utopian movement to rehabilitate the insane resulted in a wave of publicly funded asylums - many of which became unexpected centers of cultural activity. Housed in magnificent structures with lush grounds, patients participated in theatrical programs, debating societies, literary journals, schools, and religious services. "Theaters of Madness" explores both the culture these rich offerings fomented and the asylum's place in the fabric of nineteenth-century life, reanimating a time when the treatment of the insane was a central topic in debates over democracy, freedom, and modernity. Benjamin Reiss explores the creative lives of patients and the cultural demands of their doctors. Their frequently clashing views turned practically all of American culture - from blackface minstrel shows to the works of William Shakespeare - into a battlefield in the war on insanity. Reiss also shows how asylums touched the lives and shaped the writing of key figures, such as Emerson and Poe, who viewed the system alternately as the fulfillment of a democratic ideal and as a kind of medical enslavement. Without neglecting this troubling contradiction, "Theaters of Madness" prompts us to reflect on what our society can learn from a generation that urgently and creatively tried to solve the problem of mental illness
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-229) and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Psychiatric hospitals -- United States -- History -- 19th century
Psychiatric hospitals -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century
Hospitals in literature -- History -- 19th century
Mentally ill, Writings of the, American -- History and criticism
Medicine in literature.
Manners and customs.
Hospitals, Psychiatric -- history
Medicine in Literature
Cultural Characteristics
History, 19th Century
Mentally Ill Persons -- history
PSYCHOLOGY -- Mental Health.
PSYCHOLOGY -- Mental Illness.
MEDICAL -- Mental Health.
Medicine in literature.
Manners and customs.
Hospitals in literature.
Mentally ill, Writings of the, American.
Psychiatric hospitals.
Psychiatric hospitals -- Social aspects.
SUBJECT United States https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D014481
Subject United States.
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780226709659
0226709655
1281966282
9781281966285
9786611966287
6611966285