“It is a Path I have Prayed to Follow”: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Romantic Disease

Lawlor, Clark

doi:10.1057/9780230117471_6

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…15 Radden's differences focus on the socially constructed aspects of melancholy as a condition, aspects also well documented by critics such as Lawlor and, with specifi c reference to Burns, by Costa and Dickson. [16][17][18][19] In the face of a culturally dependent defi nition, the potentially performative nature of Burns's melancholy cannot, in the long term, be ignored.…”

Section: Retrospective Diagnosismentioning

confidence: 99%

Mood Disorder in the Personal Correspondence of Robert Burns: Testing a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach

Hansen

Smith

2018

Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

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Robert Burns has long been recognised as someone who experienced episodes of melancholia, but no detailed, systematic and objective assessment of his mental health has been undertaken. We tested a novel methodology, combining psychiatric and literary approaches, to assess the feasibility of using Burns's extensive personal correspondence as a source of evidence for assessing the presence of symptoms of a clinically significant mood disorder. We confirmed the potential of this approach and identified putative evidence of episodes of depression and hypomania within the correspondence. While not conclusive of a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder, this work highlights a need for further systematic examination of Burns's mental health and how this may have influenced his work.

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Section: Retrospective Diagnosismentioning

confidence: 99%

Mood Disorder in the Personal Correspondence of Robert Burns: Testing a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach

Hansen

Smith

2018

Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

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“…Clark Lawlor has argued that 'illnessan often painful phenomenon and negatively constructed experiencecan paradoxically give pleasure to the beholder and even to the sufferer'. 32 Focusing on pulmonary tuberculosis (consumption), Lawlor has shown how the combination of medical, cultural and religious discourses combined to create the notion that this was a disease that not only beautified the sufferer but also inspired creativity and spirituality. 33 Both Lawlor and Heather R. Beatty have emphasised that the cultural capital accrued by sufferers from nervous or Romantically inspired diseases did not necessarily negate the reality of their symptoms: 'it would be unfair to dismiss all patients who revelled in the fashionable implications of their sensibility-induced disorders as mere actors.'…”

Section: Fashionable Disease: a Declining Narrative?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Venus of Margate: Fashion and Disease at the Seaside

Johnson¹

2017

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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Through an examination of sea-bathing at Margate this article explores the interactions between fashion and disease at the eighteenth-century English seaside. Drawing on Thomas Rowlandson's companion prints Venus's Bathing (Margate), this article will show how a new trend in resort literature portrayed the sea-bathing body as young, healthy and sexually attractive. This new narrative, it will be argued, was slowly replacing that of the fashionable sufferer: those who sought to gain cultural capital through the exaggerated display of symptoms were ridiculed, as visitors began to view a healthy body as a greater cultural asset than a sick one.

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“…24 In France, as in England, consumptive illness conferred 'a perverse kind of cultural capital'. 25 In the theatre, however, this capital had considerably less value throughout the long eighteenth century than it boasted elsewhere. On the French stage during this period, consumptive symptoms were more likely to be laughed at than wept over.…”

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confidence: 99%

Consumption and the Stage: A Late‐Blooming Fashion

Barker¹

2017

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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Consumption reigned for much of the long eighteenth century as one of Europe's most modish ailments, but in English and French theatre things were quite different. Far from propagating the sentimental vogue for consumption, the eighteenthcentury stage often satirised it as a risible affectation. Only with the birth of French Romantic theatre and its subsequent rise to transatlantic popularity did drama begin to depict consumptive protagonists who embodied a new conception of bourgeois heroism for a revolutionary age. Through a comparative analysis of English and French performances this essay explores consumption's belated, but triumphant, emergence as a fashionable stage disease.

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“It is a Path I have Prayed to Follow”: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Romantic Disease

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Mood Disorder in the Personal Correspondence of Robert Burns: Testing a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach

Mood Disorder in the Personal Correspondence of Robert Burns: Testing a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach

The Venus of Margate: Fashion and Disease at the Seaside

Consumption and the Stage: A Late‐Blooming Fashion

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