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Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,291
Discovery Miles 12 910
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Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (Paperback)
Series: Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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