LOVE'S MADNESS

Helen Small

ISBN 10: 0198184913 / ISBN 13: 9780198184911

Published by Oxford UP, 1998

About this Item

Condition:Fine, corners round,little faded. Seller Inventory # 89514

Bibliographic Details

Title: LOVE'S MADNESS

Publisher: Oxford UP

Publication Date: 1998

Binding: PAP

Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis:

Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention. The book centers around studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as of previously neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others.

Review:

The love-mad woman is herself a convention, and the fascination of this study by Helen Small is its exploration of the variety of concerns for which the convention acts as a vehicle. Small does a good job in explaining the dubiety and sensationalism of circumstances which were such that it is not surprising to find so many fiction writers figuring madness in their work. Helen Small not only recounts its history but brings it to life. (Valerie Pedlar - Journal of Victorian Culture Spring 99)

A thorough book. As a work of research, Small's study is to be highly recommended. (John Maynard - Modern Philology.)