The Legacy of Victorian Asylums in the Landscape of Contemporary British Literature
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 25867718
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781848934528
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This chapter explores the resonance of former asylum buildings in the landscapes of contemporary literature. Knowles builds upon extant research on nineteenth-century literature and asylumdom and applies it to the landscapes of a range of twenty-first century literary texts in order to make original contributions made to asylum history. The work brings into conversation questions of conservation, memory and forgetting, trauma, space and place.
This chapter is one of the earliest responses to an emergent fascination with the legacies of former asylums in twenty-first century literature. It considers biography, creative non-fiction and fiction through Foucauldian as well as more recent social-historical and literary criticism. The method is primarily comparative; comparing and contrasting different genres, periods and styles that engage with related questions regarding the legacies of asylum buildings.
Knowles makes the case for a cross-genre literary moment in the early twenty-first century during which the sites of former lunatic asylums attracted a range of literary responses. This work has continued to inform research practice in such legacies more generally—e.g. Gothic, Romantic and weird legacies in twentieth and twenty-first century culture – and is influential in the research on history of psychiatry and the European asylum, as well as on the figure of the alienist.
The chapter is published within an edited collection of eleven essays, Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, co-edited by the author and published by Routledge. Contributors look at asylums of the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and the United States, from the perspective of those who were sent there, and of the place itself, its architecture, funding and purpose.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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