Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 72) - Softcover

Tambling, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9042010185 ISBN 13: 9789042010185

Publisher: Brill Academic Pub, 2004

Synopsis

Written using critical theory, especially by Walter Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare reads medieval and early modern texts, exploring allegory within texts, allegorical readings of texts, and melancholy in texts. Authors studied are Langland and Chaucer, Hoccleve, on his madness, Lydgate and Henryson. Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III conclude this investigation of death, mourning, madness and of complaint. Benjamin's writings on allegory inspire this linking, which also considers Dürer, Baldung and Holbein and the dance of the dead motifs. The study sees subjectivity created as obsessional, paranoid, and links melancholia, madness and allegorical creation, where parts of the subject are split off from each other, and speak as wholes. Allegory and melancholy are two modes - a state of writing and a state of being - where the subject fragments or disappears. These texts are aware of the power of death within writing, which makes them, fascinating. The book will appeal to readers of literature from the medieval to the Baroque, and to those interested in critical theory, and histories of visual culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.

Review:

"...an engaging and thoughtful study." in: Anglia, Band 123, Heft 3, 2005

About this edition

• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 9042010185
• ISBN 13: 9789042010185
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236