Old Email Archive

digest 1996-09-28 #001



11:22 PM 9/27/96 -0700
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 27 Sep 1996 06:15:36 -0700
From: Robert Maxwell Young 
Subject: Literature/Psychosis/Phrenology
Phrenology and literature. Someone raised this several weeks ago, but I
am
just getting around to answering it.
I don't know anything about phrenology in Latin American literature,
but
there is a lot on British literature. This topic also includes
physiognomy
and psychosis and literature, since phrenology grew out of physiognomy
and
was, in effect, a form of it, claiming to put physiognomy on a
sciewntific
basis. Furthermore, it was used diagnostically by doctors diagnosing
insanity. These three topics are, in practice, one.
I think Roger Cooter is likely to know of any bibliography on this
matter.
See his _Phrenology in the British Isles: An Annotated Historical
Bibliography and Index. Lodon:  Scarecrow Press, 1989
email him at: cooter@fs4.ma.man.ac.uk
Here is the table of contents of Sally Shuttleworth's new book,
_Charlotte
Bronte and Victorian Psychology_. Cambridge, 1996. She is professor of
Modern Literature at Sheffield University.
I am sure that this boook, like all her writings, will be of interst to
many members of this forum.
PART ONE
PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOURSE IN THE VICTORIAN ERA
1 The art of surveillance
2 The Haworth context
3 Insanity and selfhood
4 Reading the mind: physiognomy and phrenology
5 The female bodily econom~/
PART TWO
CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S FICTION
6 The early writings: penetrating power
7 The Professor: the  art of self-control'
8 Jane Eyre: 'lurid hieroglyphics'
9 Shirley: bodies and markets
10 Villette: 'the surveillance of a sleepless eve'
Here are some references I have culled from her notes. There are many
more:
the notes are a cornucopia.
S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science. Cambridge,
1984.
________ 'Preaching to the Nerves: Psychological Disorder in Sdensation
Function', in M. Benjamin, ed., A Questiuon of Identity: Women, Science
&
Literature. Rutgers, 1993.
______ Charlotte Bronte & Victorian Psychology. Cambridge, 1996
Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation: Cerebral Localization and
Its
Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970;
reprinted
N. Y.: Oxford. 1990 (with additional bibliography) Discusses history,
assumptions and influence of phrenology.
Margot Waddell, 'The Idea of Nature: George Eliot and Her Intellectual
Milieu', Cambridge University PhD thesis, 1976 (lots on phrenology &
on
Herbert Spencer's and Lewes' psychology).
Oswei Temkin, 'Gall and the Phrenological Movement', Bulletin of the
History of Medicine, 2l (1947), pp. 275-32l, see pp. 277-8. 23
J. Y. Hall, 'Gall's Phrenology: A RomanticPsychology', Studies in
Romanticism, 16 (I977),pp.305-l7.
For an excellent study of the social aspects of the phrenological
movement
see Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology
and
the Organization of Consent in ~ineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also De Giustino, Conquest of
Mind:
Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975), and
T. M. Parssinen, 'Popular Science and Society: The Phrenological
Movement
in Early Victorian Britain', Journal of Social  History 7 (1974), pp. 1
- -20.
Angus McLaren, 'Phrenology: Medium and Message', Journal of Modern
History,
46 (1974), p. 96 and Cooter, Cultural Meaning p. 178. The lectures
which
went to form Self-Help were delivered originally to the Leeds Mutual
Improvement Society in 1845. For further details of Smiles' activities
in
Leeds, see A. Tyrrell, 'Class Consciousness in Early Victorian Britain:
Samuel Smiles, Leeds Politics, and the Self-Help Creed', ~ournal of
British
Studies, 9 (l970), pp. 102-25.
For an important debate on responses to phrenology in Edinburgh see G.
N.
Cantor, 'The Edinburgh Phrenology Debate: 1803-28', and 'A Critique of
Shapin's Local Interpretation of the Edinburgh Phrenology  Debate',
Annals
of Science, 32 (1975), pp. 196-219, and pp. 245-56; and S. Shapin,
'Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early
Nineteenth-Cenntury Edinburgh',     AnnalsofScience,32
(1975),pp.2l9-43.
See also S. Shapin, 'The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and
Social Interests in the Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes', in R. Wallis
ed.,
On the Margins of Science: 'The Social Construction of Rejected
Knowledge,
Sociological Review Monographs, 27 (University of Keele, 1979), pp.
139-78,
and 'Homo Phrenologicus: Anthropological Perspectives on a Historical
Problem', in B. Barnes and S. Shapin eds., Natural Order: Historical
Studies of Scientific Culture (London: Sage, 1979), pp. 41-71.
__________________________________________
Robert Maxwell Young:  robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk  26 Freegrove Rd., London
N7
9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306  fax.+44 171 609 4837 Professor of
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic
Studies, University of  Sheffield. Home page and writings:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/  Process Press publications:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/index.html
'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus