The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance

by Marion Wells

This book offers a new reading of early modern romance in the light of historically contemporary accounts of mind, and specifically the medical tradition of love-melancholy. The book argues that the medical profile of the melancholic lover provides an essential context for understanding the characteristic patterns of romance: narrative deferral, epistemological uncertainty, and the endless quest for a quasi-phantasmic beloved. Unlike many recent...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804750467
• ISBN13: 9780804750462
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.0"