Suffering Scholars
"Suffering Scholars explores ideas with long lives and intricate cultural resonances. It shows the value of interdisciplinary approaches to concerns that pervaded societies in the past, and indeed continue to do so today."
<i>Modern Philology</i>
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Les mer
In Suffering Scholars, Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Stael, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.
Detaljer
- Forlag
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Innbinding
- Innbundet
- Språk
- Engelsk
- Sider
- 280
- ISBN
- 9780812249927
- Utgivelsesår
- 2018
- Format
- 23 x 15 cm
Anmeldelser
"Suffering Scholars explores ideas with long lives and intricate cultural resonances. It shows the value of interdisciplinary approaches to concerns that pervaded societies in the past, and indeed continue to do so today."
<i>Modern Philology</i>
"Anne C. Vila's book is a model of concise and well-articulated rigor on a fascinating topic that has been neglected and overlooked-the medical literature devoted to the sicknesses of men of letters. She shows how these texts provide an excellent vantage point from which to survey significant aspects of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and medicine. A striking achievement."
Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London