Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to John Clare
- The Cambridge Companion to John Clare
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Clare the Poet
- Part II Clare the Naturalist
- Part III Clare’s Image
- Part IV Influences and Traditions
- 12 Clare and Religion
- 13 John Clare and the British Labouring-Class Tradition
- 14 The Politics of Nature
- 15 Clare’s Health
- 16 Clare among the Poets
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To Literature
15 - Clare’s Health
from Part IV - Influences and Traditions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2024
- The Cambridge Companion to John Clare
- The Cambridge Companion to John Clare
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Clare the Poet
- Part II Clare the Naturalist
- Part III Clare’s Image
- Part IV Influences and Traditions
- 12 Clare and Religion
- 13 John Clare and the British Labouring-Class Tradition
- 14 The Politics of Nature
- 15 Clare’s Health
- 16 Clare among the Poets
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To Literature
Summary
This essay revisits the relationship between Clare’s mental and physical health and his writings by considering the importance of taking him on his own terms. Appraising the critical history of diagnostic approaches towards Clare’s mental and physical distress, it suggests that such categoric approaches to the poet’s psychophysiological life are unsatisfactory. It turns instead to a key term that Clare used repeatedly to describe his varied forms of disorder – his ‘indisposition’ – and argues that it remains important to Clare and to us as readers of him because of its dislocating and indecisive potential. Considering his unsettled position within the medical and literary culture in which he lived, and broadening the range of his medical encounters and vocabulary beyond the narrow context of the asylum, the essay discuss Clare’s symptoms and his poetic representations of them as entangled with his mobility across, and unstable status within, different places, social worlds, and identities.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to John Clare , pp. 227 - 240Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024