The Melancholy Assemblage - by Drew Daniel (Paperback)

About the Book

Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, The Melancholy Assemblage examines how the interpretive experience of emotion produces social bonds. Placing readings of early modern painting and literature in conversation with psychoanalytic theory and assemblage theory, this book argues that, far from isolating its sufferers, melancholy brings people together.

Book Synopsis

This book considers melancholy as an "assemblage," as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, Daniel argues that the basic disciplinary tension between medicine and philosophy persists within contemporary debates about emotional embodiment.

To make this case, the book binds together the paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the drama of Shakespeare, the prose of Burton, and the poetry of Milton. Crossing borders and periods, Daniel combines recent theories which have--until now--been regarded as incongruous by their respective advocates.

Asking fundamental questions about how the experience of emotion produces community, the book will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature, psychoanalysis, the affective turn, and continental philosophy.

Review Quotes

". . . a powerfully engaging and deeply rewarding study of melancholy in English Renaissance literature."-Graham Hammill, University at Buffalo, SUNY

"In this stimulating, inventive, and moving volume by one of Shakespeare studies' most brilliant and original emerging voices, Drew Daniel uses the history of melancholy in order to map the haptic loops and iconic postures that bind together thinking, feeling, and making in art and life. Along the way he answers questions that really matter, such as how melancholy forges friendships among misanthropes, and why fashion makes us sad."-Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

"This is an alert and edgy work by a major new voice in Renaissance studies."--Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL (Recent STudies in Tudor and Stuart Drama)

About the Author

Drew Daniel is Assistant Professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University.