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Beschreibung
"Voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy. Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls "the joy of the worm," after Cleopatra's embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare's play-a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between "self-killing" and "suicide." Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of early modern literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicates this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. The "joy of the worm" emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate "trolling," but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love"--
"Voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy. Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls "the joy of the worm," after Cleopatra's embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare's play-a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between "self-killing" and "suicide." Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of early modern literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicates this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. The "joy of the worm" emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate "trolling," but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love"--
Über den Autor
Drew Daniel is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats and The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology of the English Renaissance.
Details
Erscheinungsjahr: 2022
Genre: Allgemeine Lexika, Importe
Rubrik: Literaturwissenschaft
Medium: Taschenbuch
Inhalt: Einband - flex.(Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780226816500
ISBN-10: 0226816508
Sprache: Englisch
Einband: Kartoniert / Broschiert
Autor: Daniel, Drew
Hersteller: University of Chicago Press
Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, D-36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr@libri.de
Maße: 227 x 150 x 15 mm
Von/Mit: Drew Daniel
Erscheinungsdatum: 02.05.2022
Gewicht: 0,426 kg
Artikel-ID: 120687853

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