
Contents
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Body and Soul: The “Heroic” Passion in Context Body and Soul: The “Heroic” Passion in Context
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Fin'amor and Love-Melancholy Fin'amor and Love-Melancholy
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Romance and the Phantasms of Desire Romance and the Phantasms of Desire
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Love-Melancholy and the “Revolt against Mourning” Love-Melancholy and the “Revolt against Mourning”
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Atra voluptas: The Dark Pleasures of Poetry Atra voluptas: The Dark Pleasures of Poetry
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Introduction: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance
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Published:January 2007
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Abstract
This book explores the complex literary/medical discourse of “amorous melancholy,” or “love-melancholy,” in relation to early modern romance. It argues that the medical profile of the erotic melancholic, whose judgment is subverted by the obsessive thought patterns (assidua cogitatio) and corrupt imagination that characterizes this disease constitutes a crucial model for the questing subject of romance. The book offers a historical and theoretical account of the medical and philosophical bases of love-melancholy as a disease of the imagination. It examines the significance of three early modern romances for Romanticism: Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The book also looks at Marsilio Ficino's De amore (1469), focusing on the complex medical history that makes possible Ficino's own commentary on love-melancholy and its relationship with grief and contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Furthermore, it discusses the philosophical and medical subplot of romance's story of atra voluptas and its attendant torments, with an emphasis on how this subplot gives voice to a robustly anti-Platonic insistence on the irreplaceability of the unique beloved.
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