The poetics of melancholy in early modern England

"The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions changed 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 emphasizing 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 analyze 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. By so doing, he details the growing cultural signification of sadness in Renaissance England, and considers what the wide-ranging writings of self-described melancholics tell us about the era in which they lived."--Jacket.