Overview

This book considers melancholy language in representative works by several British women writers in late Stuart England. To understand how these women writers understood and reframed the discussion about melancholy and women's experience of suffering in their art, it turns to the twentieth-century French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, whose radical work on melancholy in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) provides an alternative psychoanalytic perspective for considering melancholy discourse created by women experiencing alienation, depression, and anguish in earlier periods. Kristeva offers a theoretical lens for understanding loss as a significant and ongoing perspective on life experience that finds expression through art and language. This text argues that early women writers created a new expressive mode, revising existing models to account for their own losses during a time of cultural and political transitioning in England. These writers provide a melancholy aesthetic in their works or depict depressed female figures reflecting artistic angst and a new discourse within language for articulating pain.

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9781527542198

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Laura Alexander is Associate Professor of English at High Point University, USA, where she teaches courses on early British literature and culture, fairy tales, world literature, and women writers. She has twice held a national fellowship from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for research at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has written more than 30 book chapters and articles in journals, including SEL: Studies in English Literature 1600-1900, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, Papers on Language and Literature, CEA Critic, and English Studies, among others. She is the author of Fatal Attractions, Abjection, and the Self in Literature from the Restoration to the Romantics (2019); Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul (2013); and Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730 (2011).

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