MadLand · Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-15 → 2024-10-14
- EU contribution
- €269,003
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Madness in Fairy Land: (Re)Imagining Deviance in the Age of Psychiatry, 1820-1900
The MadLand project investigates literature’s creative reaction to the rigid dividing lines between (hetero)normativity and deviance as established by early psychiatry, then incorporated into the dominant cultural discourse, and still very much debated today. In its transatlantic and interdisciplinary exploration of 19th-century British, French, and US medicine and literature, MadLand demonstrates that in Europe and North America fairy-tale and medical discourses on deviance and abnormality similarly intersected, influencing each other and exchanging knowledge and visual representations. In the 19th century, writers reworked canonised fairy tales or experimented with fairy-tale settings, characters, motifs, and topoi to represent contemporaneous mental pathologies, psychological abnormalities, and sexual perversions. Focusing on the representation of deviance in fairy-tale narratives as a transnational, transcultural, and translinguistic motif that challenged nationally codified barriers, the overall objectives of MadLand are to expand our understanding of the fairy-tale traditions in 19th-century Britain, France, and the US from a comparative perspective, and to demonstrate how fairy tales contributed to the cultural – and influenced the medical – discourse on abnormality in Europe and North America.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
‘Madness in Fairy Land’ (MadLand) is an interdisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale and medical discourses on deviance and abnormality in 19th-century Britain, France, and the US. The project demonstrates the mutual knowledge-exchange between psychiatry and literature in interpreting, understanding, and (re)imagining deviance. In its comparative textual analysis of treatises on mental illness and fairy-tale narratives, MadLand provides the first transnational and translinguistic investigation: (1) of the ways in which 19th-century literary fairy tales reflected, incorporated, and questioned medical interpretations of moral and psychological deviance and of abnormal behaviour; and (2) of how the fairy-tale imagery and language of monstrosity, in turn, influenced and served as a point of reference for the codification of insanity by psychiatry in its formative period, 1820-1900.MadLand examines portrayals of diverse characters and themes in fairy-tale narratives that challenged hegemonic views of (hetero)normativity. It investigates literature’s creative reaction to the rigid dividing lines between normality and deviance as established by early psychiatry, then incorporated into the dominant cultural discourse, and still very much debated today. Exploring the emergence of psychological deviance and its representation in 19th-century fairy tales from a comparative viewpoint, MadLand contributes to current discussions on perceived norms and deviations of sexual orientation and gender expression, shedding light on medical and literary debates around ab/normal behaviour, monstrosity, gender, and sexuality in Europe and North America.As an expert in the relations between literature and medicine and 19th-century discourses of decadence, I am especially qualified to undertake this research, which will give me the opportunity to build on my existing knowledge in comparative literature as well as to acquire new skills and competences in fairy-tale and gender studies.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA · VeneziaCoordinatorItaly
- BROWN UNIVERSITY · Providence, RiUnited States
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101025123
- https://sites.brown.edu/norm-and-transgression-in-fairy-tale/the-madland-project/
Data: CORDIS, © European Union