Race and Melancholy in Early Modern English Literature Open Access

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the recurrence of melancholy as both a substance and a cultural phenomenon in English literature of the 16th and 17th centuries implicates literature as active in the emerging discourses of race. I begin with the observation that in early modern England, melancholy was believed to be both a substantive abundance of dense fluid in the body and a phenomenon of fear and sorrow that develops and persists without cause. My chapters explore how a wide cultural interest in melancholy shaped social and cultural constructions of race and difference in the writings of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Aphra Behn. I also examine how evolving ideas about race and mental disability in the early modern period influenced longstanding ideas about melancholic embodiment and emotional subjectivity. Through analyses of melancholy in drama, prose, and poetry, I explore a genealogy of racial consciousness through such issues as anger, unhappiness, religious devotion, and odor. While the writers above often embrace dominant models of humoral embodiment, they also deconstruct ideas of race, science, medicine, and disability. Moreover, to recent debates in early modern race, and embodiment my project contributes a new method for analyzing the relations between race and disability in literary texts. This project moreover uses literary texts to contribute to recent historical, theoretical and sociological conversations in early modern critical race studies. It contextualizes the impact of pre-modern theories of embodiment and emotional subjectivity on the realities of race, medicine, and disability in the modern day. 

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

‘I’ll Hold My Peace’: Cultivating Anger and Melancholy in Dido, Queen of Carthage and Antony and Cleopatra 25

‘It May Do Something’: Stealing Happiness and Melancholy in Shakespeare’s Othello 65

‘It Dyes Red Souls to White’: Witnessing Whiteness and Melancholy in Donne’s Virginia Sermon and Holy Sonnets 104

‘A Polluted Thing’: Sensing Whiteness and Melancholy in Behn’s Oroonoko 153

Bibliography 202

About this Dissertation

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, English Black Studies Health Sciences, Mental Health
Keyword	disability studies Shakespeare Church of England history of medicine critical whiteness studies British colonialism early modern literature
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Cahill, Patricia, Emory University
Committee Members	Gilman, Sander, Emory University Knecht, Ross, Emory University Little, Arthur, University of California, Los Angeles

Last modified

Primary PDF

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions
	Race and Melancholy in Early Modern English Literature ()	2020-04-12 13:49:09 -0400	Press to Select an action Download

Supplemental Files

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions