Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Joy of the Worm explores the aesthetic attitude of voluntary death in early modern literature, challenging the notion that it is always a matter of tragedy. It suggests that writers such as Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagined death as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue, and that "joy of the worm" can underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 02 May 2022
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

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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.

Weight: 564g
Dimension: 236 x 158 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226816494