Introduction
1 Democritus Junior: Discerning Care
2 Heroic Hypochondria and the Sympathetic Delusions of Melancholy
3 Exhilirating the Spirits: Study as Cure for Scholarly Melancholy
4 "Exonerating" Melancholy
Epilogue: Loving Burton, or Burton for Amateurs
Stephanie Shirilan is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University, USA.
"... an exciting, original, and powerfully persuasive rereading of
Burton's great book ... brilliantly conceptualized, incisively
argued, impressive in its scholarship, sophisticated in its
argumentation, rich in its attention to verbal details. This book
made me fall in love with Burton all over again."- Reid Barbour,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA"[The Author]
respond[s] sensitively to the texts they encounter and are alert to
the nature of melancholy as simultaneously alluring self-definition
and a deeply felt, serious affliction. If melancholy the disease is
nearly extinct, its study remains in good health."- Mary Ann Lund,
University of Leicester"...her intelligence and love of this
extraordinary book are evident everywhere, and she has provided a
welcome addition to studies about it."- Bridget Gellert Lyons,
Rutgers University
"Stephanie Shirilan has rendered a service to the melancholics
among us who desire relief from their isolated studies. (...) They
seek what Shirilan says Burton aimed to offer in The Anatomy of
Melancholy: not an amateurish compendium of the various learned
treatments of melanchgoly available to him by the time of the
volume's first printing in 1621, but a mixture of delightful,
conflicting descriptions, diagnoses, and treatments for the
affliction. (...) Shirilan is right that this is a picture of
Robert Burton we have not seen in former examinations of Anatomy.
His flights of fancy have been weighed down by what Shirilan
convincingly asserts and demonstrates is a history of misreading
(pp.5-14, 177-84). For all of these reasons, Shirilan's Robert
Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy is itself
potentially transformative for estimations of Burton and his long
volume. (...) There are many reasons to recommend Robert Burton and
the Transformative Powers of Melancholy to scholars and advanced
gratuate students working on early moderns literature, the history
of medicine, studies of the imagination and memory arts, and early
modern religion and philosophy." - Rebecca Totaro, Florida Gulf
Coast University
"Shirilan’s book thus successfully performs a kind of Burtonian
reading of the Anatomy, one that listens just as much to his
rhetorical style and mode of speaking as it does to the content of
what he says. By playing his bibliographic game of citations, she
provides a wealth of insight into the literary, philosophical,
scientific, social and theological contexts that inform the
Anatomy, but perhaps even more significantly she champions an
alternative mode of scholarship at least partially inspired by
Burton, one that is not afraid or ashamed of suggestiveness and
subjectivity."- Daniel Gabelman, Eastbourne College, in British
Society for Literature and Science, 2017"An intriguing element of
this book is its mimetic quality. In attempting to recuperate
Burton by way of a complex yet sensitive interpretation, Shirilan
rather does for him what he did for the idea of melancholy. She
models the hyper-bibliographical and ludic lexical work that Burton
requires, a style of reading surely as remarkable as the cento is a
style of writing, one that obliges us “to be entertained and
distracted from ruminating preoccupations, to be busied for
seemingly endless stretches of prose and time” (183). Though it is
unclear to me whether the imitation is deliberate, it underscores,
wonderfully, that the Anatomy resists summarization, laughingly
confounds the heresy of paraphrase; to engage with it fully means
to write it anew."- Suparna Roychoudhury, Mount Holyoke
College"Whether excavating histories of language or closely reading
a cleverly revised reference, Shirilan’s treatment of Burton is
both interesting and deeply interested — both a critical
examination of the Anatomy and a sympathetic aspiration toward the
passionate spirit that animates it."- Jessica Tabak, Providence
College
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