Madness and civilization : a history of insanity in the Age of Reason /
| Uniform title: | Folie et déraison. |
|---|---|
| Author / Creator: | |
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English French |
| Imprint: | New York : Vintage Books, 1988. |
| Subjects: | |
| Retention: | Retained for Eastern Academic Scholars' Trust (EAST) http://eastlibraries.org/retained-materials |
| Summary: | Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity. |
|---|---|
| Item Description: | Translation of Folie et déraison; histoire de la folie. |
| Physical Description: | xiii, 299 pages ; 21 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |
| ISBN: | 067972110X 9780679721109 |
| Author Notes: | Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness. Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984. (Bowker Author Biography) |