Aesthetic Hysteria

Aesthetic Hysteria is a deconstructive psychoanalytic study of hysteria, using literary texts to foreground a telling encounter between two growing discourses within English studies: that of emotion/affect and trauma studies. It brings together several academic foci - the history of medicine, aesthetic theory, speech act theory, feminism, and gender and performance studies. The study uses its theoretical and philosophical questioning of a cultural phenomenon to interrogate the politics and ends of theory, and is timely in addressing similar anxieties dominating contemporary critical and cultural theory.

Ankhi Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, UK.

Preface Acknowledgments Chapter One: Introduction: Stuck in the Gullet of the Signifier: Desire, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Hysteria Chapter Two: Too Much, Too Little: The Emotional Capital of Victorian Melodrama Chapter Three: Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens's Great Expectations Chapter Four: Broken English: Neurosis and Narration in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy Chapter Five: Emetic Theory: Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index