Aesthetic transformation and functional displacement of melancholy: The analysis of melancholic persona in the selected works of Eighteenth-century poets

Abstract

This study investigates the historical transformation, rather than diversification, of eighteenth-century melancholy through so-called melancholic authors of the period and their works characterized with authorial melancholic dispositions. The study aims to reveal that even though the qualities of each poet/speaker/narrator and the type of melancholy may differ from one another, the melancholic mood, when diagnosed and categorized, is discovered through a course of aesthetic transformation (from dark melancholy to white melancholy, namely "leucocholy" or vice versa) and functional displacement (ordeal, loss, pain as the underlying themes or therapeutic cure as discursive expression and emotional revelation). Within the scope of this study, the literary symptoms of melancholy are closely examined in order to demonstrate that poetry at the time has served as both a means of cure and a symptom of melancholy, having a therapeutic effect on the represented melancholic mind of the implied reader and the implied melancholic persona as well as the historical one. The study, therefore, foregrounding the theoretical insights into literary melancholy (particularly leucocholy), refers itself to the relevant background of melancholy as a historical phenomenon in a literary milieu of the eighteenth century since the melancholic poems are observed to exploit historical-biographical elements. With the analysis of melancholic persona represented in the texts, the study attempts to reveal that narrative voice manifests itself through certain discourses imbued with aesthetic transformation and argues that the texts under examination are to a great extent marked with melancholic verbal indicators that demonstrate white melancholy, leucocholy, the aestheticized form of dark melancholy.