Description
Book SynopsisMisanthropoetics explores efforts by Renaissance writers to represent social flight and withdrawal as a fictional escape from the incongruous demands of culture. Through the invented term of its title, this book investigates the literary misanthrope in a number of key examples from Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and the satirical milieu of Marston to exemplify the seemingly unresolvable paradoxes of social life.
In Shakespeare’s England a burgeoning urban population and the codification of social controls drove a new imaginary of revolt and flight in the figure of the literary misanthrope. This figure of disillusionment became an experiment in protesting absurd social demands, pitting friendship and family against prudent economies, testimonies of durable love against erosions of historical time, and stable categories of gender against the breakdown and promiscuity of language.
Misanthropoetics chronicles the period’s own excoriating crit
Trade Review“A fascinating and valuable topic, and one that has not been previously well studied. The figure of the misanthrope and his relationship to and flight from society is well worth exploring. Darcy writes with great fluency and wit.”—Alan Stewart, co–general editor of
The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Definition at the Limits of Form
1. Models Not to Copy: Timon of Athens, Knowledge, and the Performance of the Misanthrope
2. Midas’s Food: Paternity, Incest, and the Renaissance Economy in The Merchant of Venice and Pericles
3. Retreats of Despair and Devotion: Choice, Faith, and Exile in Book 4 of The Faerie Queene
4. “Put This in Latin for Me”: Alienated Speech and Phenomenological Discourse in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene
Epilogue: Pygmalion’s Image and Misanthropoetics in Coda
Notes
Works Cited
Index
