The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance

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Stanford University Press, 03 հնվ, 2007 թ. - 384 էջ
This book offers a new reading of early modern romance in the light of historically contemporary accounts of mind, and specifically the medical tradition of love-melancholy. The book argues that the medical profile of the melancholic lover provides an essential context for understanding the characteristic patterns of romance: narrative deferral, epistemological uncertainty, and the endless quest for a quasi-phantasmic beloved. Unlike many recent studies of romance, this book establishes a detailed historical basis for investigating the psychological structure of romance. Wells begins by tracing the development of the medical disorder first known in the Latin west as amor hereos (lovesickness) from its earliest roots in Greek and Arabic medicine to its translation into the Latin medical tradition. Drawing on this detailed historical material, the book considers three important early modern romances: Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, concluding with a brief consideration of the significance of this literary and medical legacy for Romanticism. Most broadly, the interdisciplinary nature of this study allows the author to investigate the central critical problem of early modern subjectivity in substantially new ways.

From inside the book

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The Secret Wound of LoveMelancholy
60
Epic Romance and the Poetics
96
the Gerusalemme Liberata
137
Arthurs Secret Wound
179
Female LoveMelancholy
220
La Belle Dame Sans Merci Romance
261
Notes
279
Bibliography
341
Index
353
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Էջ 149 - Spinge egli il ferro nel bel sen di punta, che vi s'immerge, e '1 sangue avido beve; e la veste, che d'or vago trapunta le mammelle stringea tenera e leve, l'empie d'un caldo fiume.
Էջ 148 - Tre volte il cavalier la donna stringe con le robuste braccia, ed altrettante da que' nodi tenaci ella si scinge, nodi di fer nemico e non d'amante.
Էջ 161 - Lei nel partir, lei nel tornar del sole chiama con voce stanca, e prega e plora, come usignuol cui '1 villan duro invole dal nido i figli non pennuti ancora, che in miserabil canto afflitte e sole piange le notti, e n'empie i boschi e l'ora.
Էջ 270 - With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow To make her amiable. On she came, Led by her Heavenly Maker, though unseen, And guided by his voice, nor uninform'd Of nuptial sanctity and marriage rites.
Էջ 268 - And there she lulled me asleep And there I dream'd — Ah! woe betide! The latest dream I ever dream'd On the cold hill side. I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried — "La belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!
Էջ 182 - On earthly braunch, the daughter of a king, Now a loose Leman to vile service bound : And eke the Graces seemed all to sing, 430 Hymen Id Hymen, dauncing all around, Whilst freshest Flora her with Yvie girlond crownd. 49 In this great passion of unwonted...
Էջ 77 - When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside of the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.
Էջ 108 - Poi ch' a me torno, trovo il petto molle de la pietate, et allor dico : - Ahi lasso, dove se

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Հեղինակի մասին (2007)

Marion A. Wells is Associate Professor of English at Middlebury College.

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