The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton

Download or read book The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton written by Adam Kitzes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the so-called Age of Melancholy, many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes and preventions of political disorder, on both specific and abstract levels. Thus, at one and the same moment, a writer could write about melancholy to discuss specific and ongoing political crises and to explore more generally the principles which generate political conflicts in the first place. In the course of developing a traditional discourse of melancholy of its own, English writers appropriated representations of the disease - often ineffectively - in order to account for the political turbulence during the civil war and Interregnum periods