Drew Daniel – författare

Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy.  In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls “joy of the worm,” after Cleopatra’s embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare’s play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between “self-killing” and “suicide.” Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. “Joy of the worm” emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate “trolling,” but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.

Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy.  In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls “joy of the worm,” after Cleopatra’s embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare’s play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between “self-killing” and “suicide.” Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. “Joy of the worm” emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate “trolling,” but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.

Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy.   In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls “joy of the worm,” after Cleopatra’s embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare’s play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration.  Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between “self-killing” and “suicide.” Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. “Joy of the worm” emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate “trolling,” but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.

Poets have depicted queer desire, same-sex love, and life outside gender norms since the beginning of the written word. Across eras and generations—from classical Greece to Renaissance England to the Harlem Renaissance—such experiences could be put into verse even when they would not have been named as we name them today. Some of these poems invite passion and admiration; others provoke new historical and literary inquiry.All the World in Thee presents a selection of poems about LGBTQ+ experiences, spanning from English translations of Homer, Sappho, and Catullus to canonical poetry by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tennyson through early-twentieth-century writers including Angelina Weld Grimké, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes. It features verse by well-known figures like John Donne, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein alongside lesser-known or recently rediscovered works, such as the first lesbian love poems recorded in Great Britain, bawdy eighteenth-century ballads, and homoerotic late-nineteenth-century poems about cowboys and football players. A critical introduction discusses patterns of LGBTQ+ poetry that persist across genres and centuries as well as the fraught history of representations of whiteness and racial difference. Edited by three prominent poetry critics and scholars, All the World in Thee provides a poignant and powerful new way to understand LGBTQ+ identities and feelings over time.

Poets have depicted queer desire, same-sex love, and life outside gender norms since the beginning of the written word. Across eras and generations—from classical Greece to Renaissance England to the Harlem Renaissance—such experiences could be put into verse even when they would not have been named as we name them today. Some of these poems invite passion and admiration; others provoke new historical and literary inquiry.All the World in Thee presents a selection of poems about LGBTQ+ experiences, spanning from English translations of Homer, Sappho, and Catullus to canonical poetry by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tennyson through early-twentieth-century writers including Angelina Weld Grimké, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes. It features verse by well-known figures like John Donne, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein alongside lesser-known or recently rediscovered works, such as the first lesbian love poems recorded in Great Britain, bawdy eighteenth-century ballads, and homoerotic late-nineteenth-century poems about cowboys and football players. A critical introduction discusses patterns of LGBTQ+ poetry that persist across genres and centuries as well as the fraught history of representations of whiteness and racial difference. Edited by three prominent poetry critics and scholars, All the World in Thee provides a poignant and powerful new way to understand LGBTQ+ identities and feelings over time.

This book considers melancholy as an "assemblage," as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, Daniel argues that the basic disciplinary tension between medicine and philosophy persists within contemporary debates about emotional embodiment.To make this case, the book binds together the paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the drama of Shakespeare, the prose of Burton, and the poetry of Milton. Crossing borders and periods, Daniel combines recent theories that have—until now—been regarded as incongruous by their respective advocates. Asking fundamental questions about how the experience of emotion produces community, the book will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature, psychoanalysis, the affective turn, and continental philosophy.

This book considers melancholy as an "assemblage," as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, Daniel argues that the basic disciplinary tension between medicine and philosophy persists within contemporary debates about emotional embodiment.To make this case, the book binds together the paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the drama of Shakespeare, the prose of Burton, and the poetry of Milton. Crossing borders and periods, Daniel combines recent theories that have—until now—been regarded as incongruous by their respective advocates. Asking fundamental questions about how the experience of emotion produces community, the book will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature, psychoanalysis, the affective turn, and continental philosophy.

Drew Daniel explores the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, with key concepts, strategies, and contexts.Previous writings about Throbbing Gristle have tended to dissolve into lurid half-truths about deviance on and offstage; their actual recordings, lyrics and images have received comparatively slim analysis. Yet their work informs a broad range of music which draws inspiration from TG's arcane, deliberately misleading example: not just 'industrial' music but also synth-pop, the lounge revival, the noise scene, techno and the English esoteric underground - they can all trace their debts to Throbbing Gristle. "Twenty Jazz Funk Greats" (a deliberately 'inconsistent' album) explains why.Drew Daniel creates an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through with a sequence of thematic entries on key concepts, strategies and contexts. For example, noise, leisure, process, the abject, information, and repetition.The book will argue that on Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, Throbbing Gristle modelled a critically new and highly promiscuous way of relating to or inhabiting musical genre - where punk rock was passionate and direct, TG were arch and mysterious, perverse and cold. Drew has interviewed all four members of the band."Thirty-Three and a Third" is a series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the past 40 years. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music.

In 20 Jazz Funk Greats Drew Daniel (of the experimental band Matmos) creates-through both his own insights and exclusive interviews with the band-an exploded view of the album''s multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through with a sequence of thematic entries on key concepts, strategies, and contexts (noise, leisure, process, the abject, information, and repetition). This is a smart and unusual book about a pioneering band.