Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Hardcover)

In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical etiologies and cures. Lesel Dawson analyzes literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. She explores the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and greensickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. Finally, she examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy and considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness.
With reference to the works of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Ford, and Davenant, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature investigates how early modern representations of lovesickness expose contemporary cultural constructions of love, revealing the relation of sexuality to spirituality and the creation and shattering of the impassioned subject. It offers an important contribution to the history of romantic love and will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, gender, and medical history.

General

Imprint:	Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	September 2008
First published:	November 2008
Authors:	Lesel Dawson
Dimensions:	223 x 144 x 18mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	256
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-926612-8
Categories:	Books > Medicine > General issues > History of medicine Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
LSN:	0-19-926612-3
Barcode:	9780199266128

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