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Responding to work by Eve Sedgwick and recent media attention to queer suicide, this project theorizes performative melancholia, a condition where, regardless of sexual orientation, overinvestment in gender norms causes subjects who are unable to embody those norms to experience socially expected ('normal') gender as something unattainable or lost.
List of contents
Introduction
Gender Normativity, Failure, and Violence from Romanticism to George Sodini
Section One: Romantic Coupling, Failure, and Melancholia
Social Bond(age)s in Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Rethinking Burney, Gender, and Violence: Camilla and the Masochistic Contract
Section Two: Melancholic Femininities
"Corrupt Nature": Performative Melancholia and Violence in Zofloya
Siren Songs: Maggie Tulliver, Music, and Performative Melancholia in The Mill on the Floss
Section Three: Melancholic Masculinities
Monstrosity and Failed Masculinity in The Giaour
Competition and Melancholic Masculinity in Caleb Williams
Section Four: Abandonment, Performative Melancholia, and Madness
Performative Melancholia and the Gothic Body in Wordsworth and Shelley
Amelia Opie's The Father and Daughter: Female Masochism and Male Madness
Section Five: After Romanticism
Refusing Butler's Binary: Bisexuality and Performative Melancholia in Mrs. Dalloway
Heternormativity and Performative Melancholia in Dancer from the Dance
About the author
Nowell Marshall is assistant professor of literary theory at Rider University in New Jersey.
