From Narcissism to Nihilism: Self-Love and Self-Negation in Early Modern Literature [Paperback]

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The poetics of personal nothingness

Chapter 3 The Narcissus myth and English Petrarchism

Chapter 4 Negation and self-negation in amatory verse

Chapter 5 The glorious nothingness of authorship

Chapter 6 Social and political contexts

Anthony Archdeacon teaches at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE. He is interested in early modern poetry, drama, ideas and culture.

This book explores how the myth of Narcissus, which is at once about self-love and self-destruction, desire and death, beauty and pain, became an ambivalent symbol of humanistic endeavour, and articulated the conflicts of early modern authorship.

In early modern literature, there were expressions of humanistic self-congratulation that sometimes verged on narcissism, and at the same time expressions of self-doubt and anxiety that verged on nihilism. The themes of self-love and self-negation had a long history in western thought, and this book shows how the medieval treatments of the themes developed into something distinctive in the sixteenth century. The two themes, either individually or combined, encompass such topics as poverty, unrequited love, transgressive sexuality, sexual violence, suicidality, self-worth, authorship, religious penitence, martyrdom, courtly ambition and tyranny.

Archdeacon uses over 100 texts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to show how the early modern writer existed in a culture of contrary forces pulling towards either self-affirmation or self-erasure. Writers attempted to nló®