Cover illustration: “A Corridor in the Asylum,” drawn by Vincent van Gogh in September 1889, depicts a hallway of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where the artist had voluntarily admitted himself in May of the same year. The Met, New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Röder, Katrin editor | Wächter, Cornelia editor
Title: The cultural heritage of psychiatry and its literary transformations / edited by Katrin Röder and Cornelia Wächter.
Description: Boston, Massachusetts : Brill, 2026. | Series: NMH, 2667-0518 ; 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “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” – Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025029399 (print) | LCCN 2025029400 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004745230 hardback acid-free paper | ISBN 9789004745247 ebook
Subjects: LCSH: Psychiatry in literature | Mental illness in literature | LCGFT: Literary criticism | Essays
Classification: LCC PN56.P9 C85 2026 (print) | LCC PN56.P9 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025029399
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025029400
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 2667-0518
ISBN 978-90-04-74523-0 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-74524-7 (e-book)
DOI 10.1163/9789004745247
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