Neurology and Modernity

As people of the modern era were singularly prone to nervous disorders, the nervous system became a model for describing political and social organization. This volume untangles the mutual dependencies of scientific neurology and the cultural attitudes of the period 1800-1950, exploring how and why modernity was a fundamentally nervous state.

'This excellent collection opens up a fascinating area of discourse in relation to the modern area, moving the debate away from established thinking on 'nerves' in terms of neurasthenia, shell-shock and neurosis,and investigating a much wider range of issues indeed a whole a culture of nervousness - informed by the new understandings of neurology. The essays range across a variety of fascinating topics (speech disorders, peristalsis, vibration-cures, paranoia), exploring the dethroned modern self, wired from within and without to its physical and social environment. For the student of bodily and mental cultures, this will be a vital text.' - Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London

Autorentext

LAURA SALISBURY is RCUK Fellow in Science, Technology, and Culture and a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published various articles on Samuel Beckett, including one on his 'aphasic' modernism. She is currently writing a book on Late Modernisms for Edinburgh University Press and researching a study of the relationships between modernism, modernity and neurological conceptions of language.

ANDREW SHAIL News International Research Fellow in Film at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He is co-editor of Menstruation: A Cultural History (with Gillian Howie, Palgrave, 2005), and editor of Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896-1912 (University of Exeter Press, 2010), and co-author, with Bob Stoate, of a BFI Film Classic on Back to the Future (2010).

Inhalt
List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction; L.Salisbury & A.Shail Beyond the Brain: Sceptical and Satirical Responses to Gall's Organology; M.K.House Neurology and the Invention of Menstruation; A.Shail Carlyle's Nervous Dyspepsia: Nervousness, Indigestion and the Experience of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain; H.Ishizuka Railway Spine, Nervous Excess, and the Forensic Self; J.F.Thrailkill 'The Conviction of its Existence:' Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs and Phantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism; A.Satz Modernism and the Two Paranoias: The Neurology of Persecution; G.Rousseau 'Nerve-Vibration': Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s and 1890s; S.Trower From Daniel Paul Schreber through the Dr. Phil Family: Modernity, Neurology and the Cult of the Case Study Superstar; M.A.Tata 'I guess I'm just nervous, then': Neuropathology and Edith Wharton's Exploration of Interior Geographies; V.Plock Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity; L.Salisbury Shell Shock as a Self-Inflicted Wound, 1915-1921; J.Meyer Modernity and the Peristaltic Subject; J.Walton Matter for Thought: The Psychon in Neurology, Psychology and American Culture, 1927-1943; M.Littlefield