Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern CultureCornell University Press, 2004 - 244 Seiten In the first book to provide a feminist analysis of early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely reveals the mobility and heterogeneity of discourses of "distraction," the most common term for the condition in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Distracted Subjects shows how changing ideas of madness that circulated through medical, dramatic, and political texts transformed and gendered subjectivities. Supernatural causation is denied, new diagnoses appear, and stage representations proliferate. Drama sometimes leads and sometimes follows other cultural discourses--or forges its own prophetic figures of distraction. Neely's final chapter provides a startling challenge to the critically alluring analogy between Bedlam and the early modern stage by documenting that Bethlem hospital offered care, not spectacle, whereas stage Bedlamites served metatheatrical and prophylactic, not mimetic, ends. An epilogue places this particular historical moment within the longer history of madness and shows how our own attitudes toward distraction are haunted by those earlier debates and representations. |
Inhalt
Initiating Madness Onstage Gammer Gurtons Needle and The Spanish Tragedy | 27 |
Reading the Language of Distraction Hamlet Macbeth King Lear | 46 |
Diagnosing Womens Melancholy Case Histories and the Jailers Daughters Cure in The Two Noble Kinsmen | 69 |
Destabilizing Lovesickness Gender and Sexuality Twelfth Night and As You Like It | 99 |
Confining Madmen and Transgressing Boundaries The Comedy of Errors The Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night | 136 |
Rethinking Confinement in Early Modern England The Place of Bedlam in History and Drama | 167 |
Then and Now | 213 |
219 | |
237 | |
Andere Ausgaben - Alle anzeigen
Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture Carol Thomas Neely Keine Leseprobe verfügbar - 2004 |
Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture Carol Thomas Neely Keine Leseprobe verfügbar - 2004 |