Title: Lovesickness and gender in early modern English literature
First published: 2008
Description: "Lesel Dawson analyzes literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. She explores the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and green sickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. Finally, she examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy and considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness."--Jacket.
Subjects: Literature and medicine, History, English literature, Melancholy in literature, History and criticism, Lovesickness in literature, Women in literature, Gender identity in literature, English literature, history and criticism, early modern, 1500-1700, Women, Psychology, Love, Modern Literature, Gender Identity, Medicine in Literature, Depressive Disorder
Places: England
Time periods: Early modern, 1500-1700, 17th century, 16th century
LC classification: PR428.M4 D38 2008