Dance of the Dialectic? Some Reflections (Polemic and Otherwise) on the Present State of Nineteenth-Century Asylum Studies.

摘要

The 1970s witnessed an intense, often acrimonious debate between revisionist and Whigeo-Whig historians over the origins and nature of the nineteenth-century asylum experience. By the early 1980s, however, there had emerged no 'new synthesis' (as one might have expected given the dialectical nature of the historical enterprise) but rather a new counter-revisionist paradigm grounded in the precepts of the 'new social history.' This counter-revisionist account is itself highly problematic, offering no convincing synthetic overview of the nineteenth-century asylum experience.