Montaigne Melancholy

Montaigne (1533-1592), the personification of philosophical calm, had to struggle to become the wise Renaissance humanist we know. His balanced temperament, sanguine and melancholic, promised genius but threatened madness. When he started his Essays, Montaigne was upset by an attack of melancholy humor: He became temperamental and unbalanced. Writing about himself restored the balance but broke an age-old taboo--happily so, for he discovered profound truths about himself and about our human condition. His charm and humor have made his writings widely enjoyed and admired.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, is one of the greatest works of early modern English prose writing, yet it has received little substantial literary criticism in recent years. This study situates Robert Burton's complex work within three related contexts: religious, medical and literary/rhetorical. Analysing Burton's claim that his text should have curative effects on his melancholic readership, it examines the authorial construction of the reading process in the context of other early modern writing, both canonical and non-canonical, providing a new approach towards the emerging field of the history of reading. Lund responds to Burton's assertion that melancholy is an affliction of body and soul which requires both a spiritual and a corporal cure, exploring the theological complexion of Burton's writing in relation to English religious discourse of the early seventeenth century, and the status of his work as a medical text.

Educated in the humanities and trained in psychiatry, Jean Starobinski is a central figure in the Geneva School of criticism. For twenty-five years his work has had considerable influence on postmodern European critics (notably Derrida), scholars of French literature, and intellectual historians. Montaigne in Motion is his subtly conceived and elegantly written study of the Essais of Montaigne, whose deceptively plainspoken meditations have entranced readers and stimulated philosophers since their first publication in 1580 and 1595. -- Publisher's description.

Perhaps as old as writing itself, the metaphor of the book as child has depicted textuality as an only son conceived to represent its father uniformly and to assure the integrity of his name. Richard L. Regosin demonstrates how Montaigne's Essais both departs from and challenges this conventional figure of textuality. He argues that Montaigne's writing is best described as a corpus of siblings with multiple faces and competing voices, a hybrid textuality inclined both to truth and dissimulation, to faithfulness and betrayal, to form and deformation. And he analyzes how this unruly, mixed brood also discloses a sexuality and gender dynamic in the Essais that is more conflicted than the traditional metaphor of literary paternity allows. Regosin challenges traditional critics by showing how the "logic" of a faithful filial text is disrupted and how the writing self displaces the author's desire for mastery and totalization. He approaches the Essais from diverse critical and theoretical perspectives that provide new ground for understanding both Montaigne's complex textuality and the obtrusive reading that it simultaneously invites and resists. His analysis is informed by poststructuralist criticism, by reception theory, and by gender and feminist studies, yet at the same time he treats the Essais as a child of sixteenth-century Humanism and late Renaissance France. Regosin also examines Montaigne's self-proclaimed taste for Ovid and the role played by the seminal texts of self-representation and aesthetic conception (Narcissus and Pygmalion) and the myth of sexual metamorphosis (Iphis). This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

Striking new readings of Montaigne's works, focussing on such concepts as scepticism and tolerance.

The connections between the emergence of modern society and the experience of melancholy are explored through a comprehensive re-examination of Soren Kierkegaard's rich and insightful writings.

A new edition of the bestselling textbook for Scottish teacher training courses.

John O’Neill reads Montaigne’s Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature and politics. The friendship between Montaigne and La Boétie was ruled neither by plenitude nor lack but by a capacity for recognition and transitivity. As an essayist Montaigne is an exemplary practitioner of a technique of difference and recognition that puts all certainties of history, philosophy and culture in the balance of weighted comparison. The essayist reveals how every absolute subjectivity or authority is shaken by its internal weakness once we move inside the contrastive structure of domination in politics, gender and race. O’Neill’s reading of the Essays strives to be faithful to the phenomenology of their embodied practices of reading-to-write-to re-read and re-write. From this standpoint he engages the principal critical readings of the Essays over the last century that have examined with great brilliance their history, structure and psychology. Whether the structure is evolutionary, structuralist, Marxist or psychoanalytical, O’Neill provides close readings of Montaigne’s literary critics. By bringing to bear the ethico-critical practice of ‘essaying’ to resist the subjection of the Essays to dominant criticism, O’Neill reminds readers that Montaigne’s appeal is in how he survived bloody cultural war with a balance of modesty and tolerance, invoking compromise where others practice violence.