English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions (Electronic book text)

The eleven essays collected in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions adopt perspectives from a variety of disciplines Aihistory, sociology, music, theater, and literary studies Aiin order to examine manifestations of and writing about hysteria in Europe during the long eighteenth century. The collection demonstrates not only that hysteria was an important cultural metaphor for the Enlightenment Aia fact sometimes obscured by scholarly emphasis on the study of hysteria as a nineteenth and early twentieth-century phenomenon Aibut also that the period Aos writers sometimes considered hysteria a blessing as well as a curse. Implicit in the various arguments of this collection is the suggestion that hysteria might be considered an expression of early modern ambivalence about the emergence of modernity.

"