Table of Contents

1. The reinvention of sadness; 2. Detachability and the passions in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender; 3. Hamlet and the humors of skepticism; 4. John Donne and scholarly melancholy; 5. Robert Burton's melancholic England; 6. Solitary Milton; Epilogue: after Galenism: angelic corporeality in Paradise Lost.

Promotional Information

This book explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions change in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"A highly significant history of the passions..." -SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 "...the visual parameters are set forth with laudable clarity and comprehensiveness. Kiefer's work, which concludes with an exemplary thirty-five page select bibliography, is a welcome addition to Shakespeare studies." -Clifford Davidson, Modern Philology "Douglas Trevor's Poetics of Melancholy is an illuminating and thought-provoking analysis of the representation of sadness in early modern English writing." -Ian Frederick Moultan, Arizona State University Polytechnic "[T]his is a fascinating, probing book." -David W. Swain, Southern New Hampshire University, American and English Studies