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      Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
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      Book

      Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

      DOI link for Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

      Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy book

      Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

      DOI link for Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

      Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy book

      ByStephanie Shirilan
      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 2016
      eBook Published 1 March 2016
      Pub. Location London
      Imprint Routledge
      DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315606699
      Pages 230
      eBook ISBN 9781315606699
      Subjects Communication Studies, Humanities, Language & Literature
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      Shirilan, S. (2016). Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315606699

      ABSTRACT

      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.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      chapter |28 pages

      Introduction

      chapter 1|34 pages

      Democritus Junior: Discerning Care

      chapter 2|38 pages

      Heroic Hypochondria and the Sympathetic Delusions of Melancholy

      chapter 3|36 pages

      Exhilarating the Spirits: Study as Cure for Scholarly Melancholy

      chapter 4|40 pages

      “Exonerating” Melancholy

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