The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England

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Cambridge University Press, 2004 M09 30 - 252 pages
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.

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Contents

The reinvention of sadness
The margins of learning
22
Detachability and the passions in Edmund Spensers The Shepheardes Calender
32
Sadness in The Faerie Queene
45
Hamlet and the humors of skepticism
61
John Donne and scholarly melancholy
85
the Sidenote as Symptom
103
Robert Burtons melancholic England
114
Solitary Milton
148
The scholarly method of the antiprelatical and divorce tracts
162
Isolated temptations in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
178
angelic corporeality in Paradise Lost
191
Notes
194
Bibliography
227
Index
244
Copyright

Burtons scholarly method
128

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About the author (2004)

Douglas Trevor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is co-editor of Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (2000), and has published articles on Michel de Montaigne, Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, and other early modern writers. He is also a contributing editor to The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (2002), and serves on the Editorial Board of the Shakespeare Yearbook.

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