“Curiouser and Curiouser”: Part II

Part II:

11th October 2018 

Wondering through the University of Chester library I remember a book that was recommended to me last year. The book in question is Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. On my search for information on hysteria this seems a fairly reasonable place to start.

I scour the library shelves and I can’t find it! This is always the way. During my search for Foucault I come across ‘The Most Dreadful Visitation’: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction by Valeria Pedlar. This is far more specific to my research into male hysteria of the Nineteenth Century and should hopefully be very useful. Now as for Foucault, a member of staff very kindly locates it out for me.

As well as the books, I decide to do some online digging for any articles that may help the initial phases of my research. My starting place for this is always the University’s online library. It’s a pretty successful start with a number of articles showing up including:

• ‘The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century’ by Erin Wilson.
• ‘Reading the Symptoms: An Exploration of Repression and Hysteria in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’’ by Colleen Hubbs.

Feeling fairly confident in the amount of research materials I have gathered thus far, I dig around using Jstor, Project Muse and the Gale database, Academic OneFile. Unfortunately, I just come across articles I have already discovered in the University’s online library.

I often find with these online journal websites and databases that different searches can bring up vastly different results. Having a break away from the websites and coming back to them with fresh ideas to search can help to find useful results.