Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness - Couverture souple

Appignanesi, Lisa

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1844088758 ISBN 13 : 9781844088751

Editeur : Virago, 2016

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

Glorious detail is marshalled from the copious reporting of these sensational stories (Independent)

Enthrallingly narrated, Appignanesi's book compels with its gruesome subject matter and delights with a wealth of bizarre detail (Miranda Seymour Daily Telegraph)

A convincing, enlightening narrative that skilfully blends scholarship with a seductive interest in what makes us human (Observer)

Appignanesi is a fine storyteller, bringing the characters and times to life . . . This is a clear and fascinating introduction to the grey zone between criminal guilt and madness (Jewish Chronicle)

Trials of Passion is a rich and rewarding work, brimful of insight and wisdom. Lisa Appignanesi does nothing by halves, and what she says about the mind doctors might describe her own book: "their profession is an art - an art of understanding the human" (Literary Review)

Appignanesi combines a historian's expertise with a novelist's eye for lurid detail (Tatler)

A fascinating portrayal of unhinged lovers caught between lawyers and mind doctors in three turn-of-the-century court cases (Lara Feigel Observer)

Novelist, feminist, cultural critic and historian Lisa Appignanesi is an intellectual star in London where she chairs the Freud Museum, writes about women and psychiatry, and has been awarded the OBE for services to literature. Her cosmopolitan background, scholarly expertise, and narrative verve unite in this analysis of three sensational crimes of passion in England, France, and the United States, and the ways doctors and lawyers battled to explain and judge them in the courts. An exciting, enthralling and enlightening book (Elaine Showalter)

A stupendous achievement, combining brilliant historical sleuthing with masterful storytelling. Appignanesi's book offers at once a canny cross-cultural analysis of the (mis-) uses of the insanity plea and an evocative account of how our forebears a hundred years ago made sense of the lethal havoc that could be wreaked by unassuaged jealousies and amorous obsessions. Trials of Passion transforms our understanding of the origins of 'the sexual century' - the one we've just left behind, but which continues to leave its marks on our present (Dagmar Herzog, author of Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History)

A mosaic of law, psychology, and class strictures . . . Will satisfy readers attuned to the juncture of history, psychology, and feminism (Kirkus)

Présentation de l'éditeur :

This book journeys into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what sane, what mad or simply bad?

Brighton, 1870: A well-respected spinster infuses chocolate creams with strychnine in order to murder her lover's wife.

Paris, 1880: A popular performer stalks her betraying lover through the streets of the city for weeks and finally takes aim.

New York, 1906: A millionaire shoots dead a prominent architect in full view of a theatre audience.

Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts,this book brings to life a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. An increasingly popular press allowed the public unprecedented insight into accounts of transgressive sexuality,savage jealousy and forbidden desires.

With great story-telling flair, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honour, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped - the theatre of the courtroom.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Virago
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1844088758
• ISBN 13: 9781844088751
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 448