Review of Robert Darcy’s Misanthropoetics: Social Flight and Literary Form in Early Modern England

Review of Robert Darcy, Misanthropoetics: Social Flight and Literary Form in Early Modern England. University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 268.

Robert Darcy’s book opens with a statement of what it is not about. It is not, we are cautioned on the first page, a study of a dramatic or poetic type, an account of contemporary manifestos by misanthropes aimed at critiquing and redressing the ills of their society, or a diagnosis of melancholia. What it is about, instead, is the figure of the misanthrope defined as the “symptomatic embodiment of an advanced mode of response to irreconcilable demands routinely visited upon human participants in the cultures that form them.” Put succinctly, “the literary misanthrope” investigated in this book is the embodiment of what Darcy describes as “a general human experience of culture,” one defined by “self-extraction” from a society which places “incongruous demands” on human subjects (2). The misanthrope’s response to these irreconcilable demands is to flee society and find refuge in the hate of humankind. Rather problematic is the conceptualization of the “incongruous demands” of culture on individuals as divorced from those individuals’ positionalities in relation to the axes of class, gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other categories of difference which fundamentally shape such individuals’ experiences of societal demands. While Darcy acknowledges briefly in a 2-page conclusion the fact that the book does not examine the figure of the female misanthrope, claiming that such figures are “either exceedingly rare or nonexistent”…