Showalter is considered problematic by historians of psychiatry who have actually gone anywhere near psychiatric records of the period...
I have a lot of issues with that book and the way that people who are Not Historians of Psychiatry or aware that that's a field in which there's been a lot of work since take it as Eternal Gospel and the only thing they need to read.
It keeps coming up as a rec on a listserv I'm on, some 30 years since it first appeared, and I get increasingly grumpy about its appeal to literary scholars. It is one of several books in the same category: historians think they're over-simplistic but v seductive presentations of the All More Complicated historical narrative, but scholars in other fields treat them as Definitive.
no subject
I have a lot of issues with that book and the way that people who are Not Historians of Psychiatry or aware that that's a field in which there's been a lot of work since take it as Eternal Gospel and the only thing they need to read.
It keeps coming up as a rec on a listserv I'm on, some 30 years since it first appeared, and I get increasingly grumpy about its appeal to literary scholars. It is one of several books in the same category: historians think they're over-simplistic but v seductive presentations of the All More Complicated historical narrative, but scholars in other fields treat them as Definitive.