Robert Burton (scholar) | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 29 pages of analysis & critique of Robert Burton (scholar).

Robert Burton (scholar) | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 29 pages of analysis & critique of Robert Burton (scholar).
This section contains 7,869 words
(approx. 27 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Devon L. Hodges

SOURCE: Hodges, Devon L. “Anatomy as Reason and Madness.” In Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy, pp. 107-23. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Hodges considers The Anatomy of Melancholy to be a treatise poised between humanism and rationalism, focusing on how the work countenances the coexistence of madness and reason in seventeenth-century thought—a condition rejected by the eighteenth-century quest for “objective knowledge.”

Compared with Bacon's dynamic, scientific project to inaugurate a new order of things, Burton's great lumpy Anatomy of Melancholy looks particularly hesitant and unfocused. And because of this, Burton's work serves as a reminder that the institution of “analytico-referential” discourse did not end all questions about the proper way to get at the truth. The Anatomy of Melancholy is narrated by an “I” that worries about its madness rather than by a persona confident of its powers—and this “I” is madly ambivalent...

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This section contains 7,869 words
(approx. 27 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Devon L. Hodges
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Critical Essay by Devon L. Hodges from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.