Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950

'This excellent collection opens up a fascinating area of discourse in relation to the modern area, moving the debate away from established thinking on 'nerves' in terms of neurasthenia, shell-shock and neurosis,and investigating a much wider range of issues indeed a whole a culture of nervousness - informed by the new understandings of neurology. The essays range across a variety of fascinating topics (speech disorders, peristalsis, vibration-cures, paranoia), exploring the dethroned modern self, wired from within and without to its physical and social environment. For the student of bodily and mental cultures, this will be a vital text.' - Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London

LAURA SALISBURY is RCUK Fellow in Science, Technology, and Culture and a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published various articles on Samuel Beckett, including one on his 'aphasic' modernism. She is currently writing a book on Late Modernisms for Edinburgh University Press and researching a study of the relationships between modernism, modernity and neurological conceptions of language.

ANDREW SHAIL  News International Research Fellow in Film at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He is co-editor of Menstruation: A Cultural History (with Gillian Howie, Palgrave, 2005), and editor of Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896-1912 (University of Exeter Press, 2010), and co-author, with Bob Stoate, of a BFI Film Classic on Back to the Future (2010).