The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton

The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton PDF Author: Adam Kitzes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135503079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
During the so-called Age of Melancholy, many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes and preventions of political disorder, on both specific and abstract levels. Thus, at one and the same moment, a writer could write about melancholy to discuss specific and ongoing political crises and to explore more generally the principles which generate political conflicts in the first place. In the course of developing a traditional discourse of melancholy of its own, English writers appropriated representations of the disease - often ineffectively - in order to account for the political turbulence during the civil war and Interregnum periods

The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton

The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton PDF Author: Adam Kitzes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135503079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the so-called Age of Melancholy, many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes and preventions of political disorder, on both specific and abstract levels. Thus, at one and the same moment, a writer could write about melancholy to discuss specific and ongoing political crises and to explore more generally the principles which generate political conflicts in the first place. In the course of developing a traditional discourse of melancholy of its own, English writers appropriated representations of the disease - often ineffectively - in order to account for the political turbulence during the civil war and Interregnum periods

Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy PDF Author: Stephanie Shirilan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317062264
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a cento - an ancient form of satire that quotes and misquotes authoritative texts in often subversive ways - and that his express intent in so doing is to offer his readers literary therapy for melancholy. This book explores the ways in which the Anatomy dispenses both direct physic and more systemic medicine by encouraging readers to think of melancholy as a privileged mental and spiritual acuity that requires cultivation and management rather than cure. Refuting the prevailing historiography of anxious early modern embodiment that cites Burton as a key witness, Shirilan submits that the Anatomy rejects contemporary Neostoic and Puritan approaches to melancholy. She reads Burton’s erraticism, opacity, and theatricality as modes of resistance against demands for constancy, transparency, and plainness in the popular literature of spiritual and moral hygiene of his day. She shows how Burton draws on rhetorical, theological, and philosophical traditions that privilege the transformative powers of the imagination in order to celebrate melancholic impressionability for its capacity to inspire and engender empathy, charity, and faith.

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England PDF Author: Douglas Trevor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521834698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions change in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Typically categorized as 'literary' writers Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton and John Milton were all active in the period's reappraisal of the single emotion that, due to their efforts, would become the passion most associated with the writing life: melancholy. By emphasising the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by these figures, Douglas Trevor asserts that quintessentially 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes shape the methods by which these same writers come to analyse their own moods. He also examines early modern medical texts, dramaturgical representations of learned depressives such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the opposition to materialistic accounts of the passions voiced by Neoplatonists such as Edmund Spenser.

Shakespearean Melancholy

Shakespearean Melancholy PDF Author: J.F. Bernard
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474417345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
A new edition of the bestselling textbook for Scottish teacher training courses.

Melancholy Politics

Melancholy Politics PDF Author: Jean-Philippe Mathy
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271037849
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The current cultural climate in France is often described as one of &“d&éclinisme&” or &“sinistrose,&” a mixture of pessimism about the national future, nostalgia for the past, and a sinister sense of irreversible decline concerning the present. The notion of &“democratic melancholia&” has become widely popular, cropping up time and again in academic papers and newspaper articles. In Melancholy Politics, Jean-Philippe Mathy examines the development of this disenchanted mood in the works of prominent French philosophers, historians, and sociologists since the beginning of the 1980s. This period represents a significant turning point in French intellectual life, as the legacy of major postwar and sixties theorists such as L&évi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault was increasingly challenged by a younger generation of authors who repudiated both Marxism and structuralism. The book is not a classic intellectual or cultural history of post-1968 France, but rather a contribution to the understanding of the present&—a collection of soundings into what remains largely a complex, ongoing process.

The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900 PDF Author: Kimberly Anne Coles
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137338210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.

Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton

Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton PDF Author: Reuben Sánchez
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137397802
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book analyzes the iconographic traditions of Jeremiah and of melancholy to show how Donne, Herbert, and Milton each fashions himself after the icons presented in Rembrandt's Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem , Sluter's sculpture of Jeremiah in the Well of Moses, and Michelangelo's fresco of Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel.

Misanthropoetics

Misanthropoetics PDF Author: Robert Darcy
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496223837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Misanthropoetics explores efforts by Renaissance writers to represent social flight and withdrawal as a fictional escape from the incongruous demands of culture. Through the invented term of its title, this book investigates the literary misanthrope in a number of key examples from Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and the satirical milieu of Marston to exemplify the seemingly unresolvable paradoxes of social life. In Shakespeare’s England a burgeoning urban population and the codification of social controls drove a new imaginary of revolt and flight in the figure of the literary misanthrope. This figure of disillusionment became an experiment in protesting absurd social demands, pitting friendship and family against prudent economies, testimonies of durable love against erosions of historical time, and stable categories of gender against the breakdown and promiscuity of language. Misanthropoetics chronicles the period’s own excoriating critique of the illusion of resolution fostered within a social world beleaguered by myriad pressures and demands. This study interrogates form as a means not toward order but toward the impasse of irresolution, to detecting and declaring the social function of life as inherently incongruous. Robert Darcy applies questions of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, deconstruction and chaos theory to observe how the great deployers of literary form lost confidence that it could adhere to clear and stable rules of engagement, even as they tried desperately to shape and preserve it.

“A man very well studyed”: New Contexts for Thomas Browne

“A man very well studyed”: New Contexts for Thomas Browne PDF Author: Richard Todd
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047425057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
For many years, scholarship on Thomas Browne (1605-1682) saw him as tangential to his period’s thought and writing: an obscure and quaint stylist, detached from the turbulence of mid-seventeenth century England. This volume contributes to the current reevalution of Browne’s involvement in his times: identifying his political commitments, milieu, reading, and readers. The essays collected in this volume place Browne’s works in unexpected contexts – in Holland, Poland and Germany, in Restoration politics, in publishing history and medical theory. It presents new research into his reputation in the later seventeenth century, his manuscripts, medical dissertation, association with the Hartlib circle and habits of revision. Essays on familiar works place them in new light, while readings of his letters, notebooks, and lesser works broaden our understanding of Browne as a writer. The result is a fuller picture of Browne’s significance in seventeenth-century European culture. Contributors include: Eric Achermann, Hugh Adlington, Reid Barbour, Harm Beukers, Siobhán Collins, Louise Denmead, Karen Edwards, Doris Einsiedel, Kevin Killeen, Mary Ann Lund, Philip Major, Antonia Moon, Kathryn Murphy, Brent Nelson, and Claire Preston.

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 Volume Set PDF Author: Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405194499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1335

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Book Description
Featuring entries composed by leading international scholars, The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature presents comprehensive coverage of all aspects of English literature produced from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Comprises over 400 entries ranging from 1000 to 5000 words written by leading international scholars Arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Provides coverage of canonical authors and their works, as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, broadside ballads, commonplace books, and other popular literary forms Biographical material on authors is presented in the context of cutting-edge critical discussion of literary works. Represents the most comprehensive resource available for those working in English Renaissance literary studies Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities