Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern

Description

This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities’ scholars and historians of the emotions. Front Matter ....Pages i-xi Introduction: A Dreadful Start (Daniel McCann, Claire McKechnie-Mason)....Pages 1-14 Front Matter ....Pages 15-15 Dreadful Health: Fear and ‘Sowle-hele’ in The Prickynge of Love (Daniel McCann)....Pages 17-36 Without a Cause: Fear in the Anatomy of Melancholy (Mary Ann Lund)....Pages 37-54 ‘The Gloom of Anxiety’: Fear in the Long Eighteenth Century (Allan Ingram, Clark Lawlor)....Pages 55-78 Dreadful: Aesthetic Fear in Victorian Reading (Pamela K. Gilbert)....Pages 79-99 ‘Frightened and Rather Feverish’: The Fear of Pain in Childbirth (Joanna Bourke)....Pages 101-127 Front Matter ....Pages 129-129 Fresh Terror, New Horror: Fear and the Unfamiliar in the Old English Exodus (Andy Orchard)....Pages 131-156 Damned Above Ground: Dreadful Despair in Elizabethan and Stuart Literature (Elizabeth Hunter)....Pages 157-175 Fear, Phobia and the Victorian Psyche (Sally Shuttleworth)....Pages 177-201 The Mass Dread of Quietude and the British Anti-Noise Crusade 1919–1939 (Neil Pemberton)....Pages 203-229 The Fearful Body in Contemporary Medical Television Drama and Medical Case Reports (Martin Willis)....Pages 231-248 Ending on a Note of Fear (Priscilla Wald)....Pages 249-257 Back Matter ....Pages 259-261