Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination

This book explores how the insane asylum has profoundly impacted the American imagination. Known by various names, asylums symbolize mistreatment, fear, and imprisonment, serving as castles of despair across the countryside. In American fiction and film, treatments are torture, attendants are thugs, psychiatrists are despots.

Troy Rondinone’s “Nightmare Factories” offers the first history of mental hospitals in American popular culture. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether,” Rondinone examines how American novelists, poets, memoirists, reporters, and filmmakers have portrayed asylums and how these representations reflect broader social trends. Asylums, he argues, reflect cultural anxieties, democratic shortcomings, and ongoing mistreatment of people with mental illness. This book comes from an academic press.