Theaters of Madness
Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture
“Benjamin Reiss has in important and novel ways successfully linked the history of the mental hospital to crucial developments in American culture. No one before has made so many fascinating connections between the idea and practice of the asylum and the intellectual production of the antebellum era. Both students of asylums and students of culture will find Theaters of Madness provocative and illuminating.”—David J. Rothman, Columbia University
“Theaters of Madness captures the ‘texture of a time’ and persuasively chronicles the centrality of insanity to the era’s key public debates about democracy, freedom and enslavement, and modernization. In Benjamin Reiss’s hands, the asylum becomes both an arena for debating cultural assumptions and beliefs and an institution that itself changes the social order. This is a deeply engaging study of a fascinating topic.”—Priscilla Wald, Duke University
Introduction
Sanative Culture
Chapter One
Brothers and Sisters of Asylumia:
Literary Life in the New York State Lunatic Asylum
Chapter Two
Saneface Minstrelsy:
Blacking Up in the Asylum
Chapter Three
Bardolatry in Bedlam:
Shakespeare and Early Psychiatry
Chapter Four
Emerson’s Close Encounters with Madness
Chapter Five
What’s the Point of a Revolution?
Edgar Allan Poe and the Origins of the Asylum
Chapter Six
Out of the Attic:
Gender, Captivity, and Asylum Exposés
Epilogue
Echoes
Notes
Index
History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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