Experiences of Melancholy in Rose Tremain’s Novel Music And Silence

Abstract

The current paper shows how the experiences of melancholy are represented in Music and Silence (1999), a postmodernist historical novel by Rose Tremain. Tremain’s novel suggests that the experience of melancholy and the workings of the imagination are interconnected in a variety of ways. It represents the experience of melancholy within the broader context of the relations between the understanding and the imagination as well as between reason and unreason in the first half of the seventeenth century. Tremain’s novel makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about reason and unreason, which is an important part of the postmodernist debate with Enlightenment culture.

Keywords

• melancholy
• madness
• unreason
• Michel Foucault