頁籤選單縮合
題 名 | Gilded Pills: Writing Melancholy and Hysteria in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy |
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作 者 | Su,Tsu-chung; | 書刊名 | Tamkang Review |
卷 期 | 34:2 民92.冬 |
頁 次 | 頁139-169 |
分類號 | 874.57 |
關鍵詞 | Writing; Hysteria; The anatomy of melancholy; Melancholy; Robert burton; |
語 文 | 英文(English) |
英文摘要 | Melancholy appeals to Burton because it is the disease of great men and the secret of his inspiration. Writing melancholy turns out to be a way for Burton to align himself with great melancholic writers in the past, to achieve literary excellence, and to reach aesthetic transcendence. Even in his abject hell, the melancholic symptom is treasured, cherished, preserved, and finally affirmed through literary, cultural, and aesthetic output. The down-and-out situation is always a launch pad for him to approach or approximate the much-coveted laurels. His symptoms are precisely the signs of exceptionality and inscriptions of genius within him. For men of letters like Burton, melancholy becomes a praiseworthy attribute in its own right. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Burton's aestheticization of melancholy by means of the act of writing and his appropriation of the feminine and hysteria in his encyclopedic and all-inclusive Anatomy of Melancholy. It aims to examine the gendered rhetoric and epistemology of Burton's inquiry of melancholy, through close reading of the figures, metaphors, and representations that have always been part of medical discourse. In other words, it seeks to “anatomize” some symptomatic moments in the discursive construction of melancholy. This “anatomical” approach, which parodies that of Burton, mainly draws on theories of feminism and is deployed to lay bare the workings of phallogocentrism in Burton's Anatomy. It is our hope that by reading the work more for its cultural rendition than its medical facts this paper will not only alter the way melancholy has been, understood but also expose the hidden agenda embedded in Burton's Anatomy. |
本系統中英文摘要資訊取自各篇刊載內容。