Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in...
CHF 243.58
CHF 243.58
SKU: 9780226816494
Product Type: Books
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Author: Drew Daniel
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: CHF 243.58
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Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature by Daniel, Drew

Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

CHF 243.58

Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

CHF 243.58
Author: Drew Daniel
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy.

In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls "joy of the worm," after Cleopatra's embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare's play--a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration.

Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between "self-killing" and "suicide." Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. "Joy of the worm" emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate "trolling," but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.

Author: Drew Daniel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 06/14/2022
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9780226816494


Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2022

About the Author
Daniel, Drew: - Drew Daniel is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats and The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology of the English Renaissance.

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