Very now: Temporal aspects of melancholy in early modern English literature

David Houston Wood, Purdue University

Abstract

To recent critical formulations regarding the role of humoral theory in early modern concepts of embodiment and emotion, this dissertation offers that the volatility of the self propounded by this theory provided correspondingly volatile structures of narrative to early modern English literature. Examining the works of Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Milton across a range of genres, and in both prose and poetic contexts, this study highlights the ways in which these authors linked character emotion with subjective forms of time, tracing this correlation as it rises to a structural principle in four representative works from the period: the Arcadia, Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Samson Agonistes. Based on early modern medical texts, as well as current psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and gender studies, this project demonstrates that contemporary discourses related to the melancholy humor, in particular, contributed to forms of character derangement that allowed early modern writers to overhaul classical concepts of narrative theory with mimetic forms that reflected contemporary psychosomatic realities. These structural forms were soon exhausted, however, and my study illustrates that the simultaneous development of both observation-driven science and of the novel effectively displaced not only the humoral theory itself but its efficacy in meaning within contemporary literary forms.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

White, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Theater

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