Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination - Hardcover

Rondinone, Troy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1421432676 ISBN 13: 9781421432670

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Madhouse, funny farm, psychiatric hospital, loony bin, nuthouse, mental institution: no matter what you call it, the asylum has a powerful hold on the American imagination. Stark and foreboding, they symbolize mistreatment, fear, and imprisonment, standing as castles of despair and tyranny across the countryside. In the "asylum" of American fiction and film, treatments are torture, attendants are thugs, and psychiatrists are despots.

In Nightmare Factories, Troy Rondinone offers the first history of mental hospitals in American popular culture. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 short story "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether," Rondinone surveys how American novelists, poets, memoirists, reporters, and filmmakers have portrayed the asylum and how those representations reflect larger social trends in the United States. Asylums, he argues, darkly reflect cultural anxieties and the shortcomings of democracy, as well as the ongoing mistreatment of people suffering from mental illness.

Nightmare Factories traces the story of the asylum as the masses have witnessed it. Rondinone shows how works ranging from Moby-Dick and Dracula to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Halloween, and American Horror Story have all conversed with the asylum. Drawing from fictional and real accounts, movies, personal interviews, and tours of mental hospitals both active and defunct, Rondinone uncovers a story at once familiar and bizarre, where reality meets fantasy in the foggy landscape of celluloid and pulp.

About this title

Book Description:

How the insane asylum came to exert such a powerful hold on the American imagination.

About the Author:

Troy Rondinone is a professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. He is the author of The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865–1950 and Friday Night Fighter: Gaspar "Indio" Ortega and the Golden Age of Television Boxing.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1421432676
• ISBN 13: 9781421432670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 344