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This dissertation demonstrates how the Weltanschauung found in Álvaro Mutis´s oeuvre is profoundly influenced by a late romantic conscience found in the Latin American posvanguardia generation (1920 – 1940). Melancholy –as late modern affective condition- and fading of the subject –as narrative and aesthetic imaginary- are two central figures in his fictional universe. As a consequence of this, some of the heroes and topics in Mutis’s oeuvre are in dialogue with the main topics of the first literary movement in Hispanic America, Modernism. Some of them are: a religious ambiance in their prose, hedonism, cosmopolitanism, decadentism, Latin American landscape as entropy and a fractured self. There is a narrative logic in the literary corpus analyzed –which one can extend to Mutis’ s oeuvre. The hero, before starting his adventure, begins a psychological phenomenology called “fading of the subject”, which is a symbolic process that affects not only his stability as a hero but also the enterprise to which he is committed; all this thanks to his “melancholic condition”. This emotional process begins by revealing poetic images of internal destruction, amalgamation and death, which the hero transfers to the external world. In some of the texts analyzed this process concludes by producing death and devastation (El Húsar, La muerte del estratega), in others there is an urgent need to a symbolic resignification (Amirbar) that allows the hero to survive and start a new adventure. This “spiritual condition” is something Maqroll - Mutis’ main character- knows well when someone asks him about his precarious physical condition, “The tropical fevers...I have them already!” (Amirbar 491)

This dissertation demonstrates how the Weltanschauung found in Álvaro Mutis´s oeuvre is profoundly influenced by a late romantic conscience found in the Latin American posvanguardia generation (1920 – 1940). Melancholy –as late modern affective condition- and fading of the subject –as narrative and aesthetic imaginary- are two central figures in his fictional universe. As a consequence of this, some of the heroes and topics in Mutis’s oeuvre are in dialogue with the main topics of the first literary movement in Hispanic America, Modernism. Some of them are: a religious ambiance in their prose, hedonism, cosmopolitanism, decadentism, Latin American landscape as entropy and a fractured self. There is a narrative logic in the literary corpus analyzed –which one can extend to Mutis’ s oeuvre. The hero, before starting his adventure, begins a psychological phenomenology called “fading of the subject”, which is a symbolic process that affects not only his stability as a hero but also the enterprise to which he is committed; all this thanks to his “melancholic condition”. This emotional process begins by revealing poetic images of internal destruction, amalgamation and death, which the hero transfers to the external world. In some of the texts analyzed this process concludes by producing death and devastation (El Húsar, La muerte del estratega), in others there is an urgent need to a symbolic resignification (Amirbar) that allows the hero to survive and start a new adventure. This “spiritual condition” is something Maqroll - Mutis’ main character- knows well when someone asks him about his precarious physical condition, “The tropical fevers...I have them already!” (Amirbar 491)

This paper will argue that there are similarities between “The Raven”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Ligeia” and “Berenice” in their treatment of the common motifs of isolation and melancholy, and, furthermore, that their protagonists are similar due to their relation to these two motifs. The paper will also argue that the usage of the motif of isolation is a strategic way for the author to emphasise the Gothic horror. In order to support my argument, I will, firstly, provide an outline of how melancholy, isolation and the Gothic were understood in the nineteenth century. Secondly, I will demonstrate ways in which the works are similar. By comparing the characters’ personalities and behaviour to each other, I will illustrate how melancholy and isolation are represented in similar ways in the works of this study. Thirdly, I will show how the motif of isolation reinforces the Gothic.

This thesis adopts the medieval medical discourse on love melancholy to analyze the representation of erotic love in Keats¡¦s poetry and to the changes in his ideas concerning love. In medieval discourse on love melancholy, women are seen as demonic agents to seduce men. In the process of their seductions, these temptresses also use amatory magic and love philters to bewilder and to enthrall their ¡§games.¡¨ People who fall in love usually lose their minds, their senses, and their judgments. They appear obsessed and insane, which leads to weakness, absurdity, and mental obscurity. Many of Keats¡¦s poems depict lovesickness, such as ¡§Lamia¡¨ and ¡§La Belle Dame sans Merci.¡¨ There are evidences showing that when he was composing these poems, he was also reading medieval treaties on love melancholy, which suggests that he might to a great extent be influenced by medieval concepts on lovesickness and sexuality. The characters in these poems, furthermore, can be seen as representations of the medieval images of the ¡§agents of love,¡¦ who, usually female, seduce men and cause all kinds of symptoms of ¡§love.¡¨ Keats was influenced by medieval discourse on lovesickness not only in his poetry but also in his personal life. When he first fell in love with Fanny Brawne, seemed to act under the influence of the so-called ¡§love-sickness,¡¨ and he strived to escape from love. Nevertheless, his failure to cure himself of this ¡§disease¡¨ enabled him to perceive the restraining viewpoint of this medieval discourse in regard to being love sick. Realizing this restrictive rational ideology lurking behind the medieval ideas of love melancholy and sexuality, Keats changed his belief in lovesickness. With Lycius¡¦s accusation of Apollonius and the knight¡¦s aimless loitering, he satirizes in ¡§Lamia¡¨ and ¡§La Belle Dame sans Merci¡¨ the derogation of reason on lovesickness, while in ¡§the Ode on Melancholy¡¨ and ¡§To Autumn,¡¨ Keats represents melancholy in a way that differs from the discourse he has inherited. Instead of showing feminine beauty as threatening and haunting, he delineates it as giving a perplexing delight. Rather than sober male characters, he prefers and describes indecisive male characters in love who demonstrates qualities such as softness, capriciousness and uncertainty¡Xqualities usually associated with females. Keats came to realize that the female perplexing beauty is suppressed and disliked in a society dominated by men, and males were not allowed to express feminine traits and emotions. The emphasis on rationality in late-eighteenth century somewhat resembled the medieval times in that both emphasize male calmness and intelligence. However, experience enabled Keats to realize that, rather than singularly repel the feminizing symptoms aroused by love melancholy, it is healthier to accept both the female and male features demonstrated within a man. Emotional perturbation and temporary irrational passions are human emotions that should be permitted. Instead of running away from love, Keats with his insight into lovesickness cured his fear for lovesickness. The idea of medieval sexuality no longer haunted on Keats on his journey to love, but is criticized for its excessive rationality.

Thesis (doctoral)--l'Université de Paris III, 1977. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [663]-685) and index.

Critics have observed that in early Stuart England, the broad, socially significant concept of melancholy was recoded as a specifically medical phenomenon—a disease rather than a fashion. This recoding made melancholy seem less a social attitude than a private ailment. However, I argue that at the Stuart universities, this recoded melancholy became a covert expression of the disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration produced by pressures there—the overcrowding and competition which left many men “disappointed” in preferment, alongside James I’s unprecedented royal involvement in the universities. My argument has implications for Jürgen Habermas’s account of the emergence of the public sphere, which he claims did not occur until the eighteenth-century. I argue that although the university was increasingly subordinated to the crown’s authority, a lingering sense of autonomy persisted there, a residue of the medieval university’s relative autonomy from the crown; politicized by the encroaching Stuart presence, an alienated community at the university formed a kind of public in private from authority within that authority’s midst. The audience for the printed book, a sphere apart from court or university, represented a forum in which the publicity at the universities could be consolidated, especially in seemingly “private” literary forms such as the treatise on melancholy. I argue that Robert Burton’s exaggerated performance of melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, which gains him license to say almost anything, resembles the performed melancholy that the student-prince Hamlet uses to frustrate his uncle’s attempts to surveil him. After tracing melancholy’s evolving literary function through Hamlet, I go on to discuss James’s interventions into the universities. I conclude by considering two printed (and widely circulated) books by university men: the aforementioned The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton, an Oxford cleric, and The Temple by George Herbert, who left a career as Cambridge’s public orator to become a country parson. I examine how each of these books uses the affective pattern of courtly-scholarly disappointment—transumed by Burton as melancholy, and by Herbert as holy affliction—to develop an empathic form of publicity among its readership which is in tacit opposition to the Stuart court. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 15:30:01.702

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Long before the publishing of Verlaine's Poetes maudits , it has been written and thought, in various circles and contexts, that writers of genius were doomed to an unhappy life. Nevertheless, it was only about 1760--1770 that the conditions allowing for the emergence of a myth of the unhappy writer were gathered. This myth affirms the christlike vocation of the author and associates greatness to unhappiness. This thesis seeks to understand this mythical phenomenon within a historical perspective. The first part recounts the three principal families of topoi associated, before 1770, to authorial unhappiness. These three series are those of melancholy, poverty and persecution. In the chapters concerning these topoi, the objective is to bring to light their specificity and also the representations and the exempla that they call to mind. Moreover, the goal is to identify the connections that are at work, in discourses, between melancholy and genius on the one hand, poverty and truth on the other hand, and finally persecution and merit. Even if one can't already consider that these various discursive connections are sufficient to build a mysticism of the unhappy man of letters, they still can be studied, in their context, for what they are: a pool of topoi where the writers would soon draw some discursive materials, and from which this myth will get its historical acceptability, its obviousness. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the study of this obviousness. After Rousseau, some believe that unhappiness is inseparable from genius, and that literary vocation is a curse spelled on the poet. From then on, the object of study is not anymore to follow each topos as if it was a separate thread, but instead, to see how all this acquires the value of commonplace (lieu commun ) between 1770 and 1840, in addition to imposing itself as an horizon of meaning. The last chapter and the epilogue show that the myth lives on, during the second half