Abstract
The introduction provides an overview of the most recent publications on neo-Victorianism and points out that although most of them indicate that our current culture is mentally sick, none of them investigate how mental illness depicted in literature and other media that is set in the nineteenth century differs from its portrayal in Victorian works. This volume seeks to remedy that by analysing the treatment of the Others who were once locked up and hidden away from polite society, silenced and erased within nineteenth-century literature, since recovered by contemporary writers of neo-Victorian narratives, informed by twenty-first century knowledge and awareness of psychology. This study reveals that the ways Victorians perceived “maladies of the mind” tells us more about political agenda, gender biases, hegemonic control, social normalisation and cultural history than it does about mental illness.
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Ayres, B., Maier, S.E. (2020). Introduction: Neo-Victorian Maladies of the Mind. In: Maier, S., Ayres, B. (eds) Neo-Victorian Madness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46582-7_1
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