The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton

ISBN-13: 9780415976282 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 270 str.

Adam H. Kitzes

Opis

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

Spis treści

Acknowledgments Introduction: Black Humor Section I: The Production of Melancholy as a Discourse Chapter One: Melancholy and the Possibility of Nationhood In Bright and Spenser Chapter Two: Reason is Fled to Beasts: Malcontents and Animals in the Humour Plays of Jonson and Shakespeare Chapter Three: Civil Dissension and its Malcontents, Or, States of Melancholy Section II: Melancholy and the Question of Government Chapter Four: And Yet I am My Own Executioner: Rumor, Suicide, and Textual Authority in John Donne's Devotions Chapter Five: Robert Burton and the Language of Melancholy Section III: The Distractions of the Times Chapter Six: The Distractions of the Times: Ideologies of Madness and Disease during the Civil War and Interregnum Chapter Seven: Tell us the Sum: Milton's Accounts of Melancholy and Madness In the 1670s Notes Bibliography Index

O autorze

Adam Kitzes