Overview

This volume investigates the role of English, British, Irish, American, Canadian and Nigerian anglophone literary conceptualizations of mental and social distress, its diagnosis and treatment as transformative parts of the cultural heritage of psychiatry. Demonstrating that the history of psychiatry is not a narrative of unbridled, unequivocal progress, the volume explores how literary texts negotiate and critique dominant and alternative forms and traditions of treatment and care, how they challenge the medicalization of non-normative thoughts and behaviour and how they bear witness to and fragmentarily retrieve and imagine suppressed voices, thereby producing counter-cultural memories.

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9789004745230

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Author Information

Katrin Röder is Professor of English Literature at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. Her research areas include early modern and 18th-century literature and culture, affect studies, gender studies, critical disability studies and contemporary anglophone life storying. She has co-edited a themed issue on “Shame and Shamelessness in Anglophone Literature and Media” with the European Journal of English Studies (2019) and is currently preparing a monograph on shame as a narrative affect in contemporary automedial art. Cornelia Wächter is Professor of British Cultural Studies at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The ‘Warder’ in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination (2015) and co-editor of, for instance, Negotiating Institutional Heritage and Wellbeing (2022) and Narrating the Heritage of Psychiatry (2024). She was the principal investigator and coordinator of the international, interdisciplinary network Complicity: Enfoldings and Unfoldings, funded by the German Research Foundation.

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