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Among the more important aspects of postmodernism is the possibility it offers of understanding literature in the light of the cultural assumptions of its time. Peter Melville Logan's study views 19th-century British narratives from the vantage point of the then prevalent ideas about the body in sickness and in health. The term hysteria refers not to the classical psychoanalytic use of the term but to the definition of Enlightenment medicine as “nerves and a
nervous temperament.” Although he is fully aware that Breuer and Freud locate hysteria in the psyche with the body as the affected locus of the illness, Logan seeks to understand hysteria in Georgian and early Victorian terms.
Thus he begins his study with the originator of the term “nervous temperament,” the British physician Thomas Trotter, whose A View of the Nervous Temperament deals with the connection between the social environment and the nervous condition of the burgeoning middle class. Among the symptoms of the nervous body are “a selfish desire of engrossing the sympathy and attention of others to the narration of their own sufferings” (p. 16). Although hysteria comes to be associated not with a direct linguistic disturbance, as Freud would have it, but with a compulsion to speak, the resulting tests of these first-person narratives derive from pathology. Hence, Logan's “nervous narrator's paradox” if the “body talks,” the narrating activity itself is a symptom of a nervous condition. Logan traces the problem of a social narrative compelled by “the order of society, then impressed on the inscribable body of the individual, and finally enacted in that individual's conduct” (p. 48). The narratives analyzed in detail are William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Maria Edgeworth's Harrington , and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). The study concludes with the problem of the inherently ambiguous meaning of medical signs that are de