-
- This book is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- Online publication date:
- July 2017
- Print publication year:
- 2006
- Online ISBN:
- 9781781387733
Last updated 2nd August 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. As we resolve the issues resulting from this, we are also experiencing some delays to publication. We are working hard to restore services as soon as possible and apologise for the inconvenience. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform (www. oapen. org).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. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The ‘Most Dreadful Visitation.’ This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson’s Maud, Wilkie Collins’s Basil, and Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings—and fears—of mental degeneracy.
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