The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions

The eleven essays collected in The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions adopt perspectives from a variety of disciplines-history, sociology, music, theater, and literary studies-in order to examine manifestations of and writing about hysteria in Europe during the long eighteenth century. The collection demonstrates not only that hysteria was an important cultural metaphor for the Enlightenment-a fact sometimes obscured by scholarly emphasis on the study of hysteria as a nineteenth and early twentieth-century phenomenon-but also that the period’s writers sometimes considered hysteria a blessing as well as a curse. Implicit in the various arguments of this collection is the suggestion that hysteria might be considered an expression of early modern ambivalence about the emergence of modernity.