Misanthropoetics by Robert Darcy, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Misanthropoetics names the efforts by Renaissance writers to experiment with representing social flight and withdrawal as a way of avoiding the incongruous demands of culture. Misanthropoetics explores the literary misanthrope in a number of key examples from Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and the satirical milieu of Marston to exemplify the seemingly unresolvable set of paradoxes of social life. In Shakespeare's England a burgeoning urban population and the consolidation and codification of social controls drove a new imaginary of social revolt and flight in the figure of the literary misanthrope. The literary misanthrope became an experiment in protesting absurd social demands, pitting friendship against prudent economics, testimonies of durable love against erosions of historical time, and stable categories of gender against the breakdown and promiscuity of language. Misanthropoetics provides an excoriating critique of the illusion of resolution from within a social world with myriad pressures and demands. This study illuminates form as a means not toward order but toward the impasse of irresolution, to detecting and declaring the social function of life as inherently incongruous. Robert Darcy uses a theoretical lens, reaching toward the limits of phenomenology and psychoanalytic explanations, deconstruction and chaos theory. The resulting study observes how users of form lost confidence that it could adhere to clear and stable rules of engagement, even as they tried desperately to shape and represent it. | Misanthropoetics by Robert Darcy, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters