doctoral dissertation, 2023
(for Grushenka)
This dissertation draws a distinction between medieval and psychoanalytic representations of melancholia as something repressed on the level of narrative structure and as a subjective mode of enjoyment. In each chapter I explore a problematic that psychoanalysis has traditionally conceived in melancholic terms: gender, the object, and the symptom. I argue that melancholia offers a useful reference point for understanding not only how medieval literary texts articulate accounts of gender, ideology and the family, but also some of the uses late medieval English writers made of melancholic affect for their novel interpretations of genres such as the dream vision and the complaint. If melancholia is symptomatic, repressive and pathological, I argue that there may also be a sense in which this symptomaticity itself might be seen as constitutive of a subjective position through which otherwise repressed forms of self-knowledge and enjoyment might begin to be articulated.