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The lucidity of Daniel's razor-sharp prose is surpassed only by the boldness and sensitivity of his thought. Joy of the Worm resists the easy logic of secularization, whereby classical valorization and Christian condemnation of self-killing sequentially give way to a modern understanding of suicide as a cry for help. Instead, Daniel attunes us to materialist understandings and aesthetic representations of self-destruction in which cruelty and tenderness, sorrow and mirth, ugliness and beauty mingle conceptually and tonally. Daniel's meticulous and humane readings attune us to a complex affective and social landscape surrounding suicide. * Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania * What happens if we take seriously the failed seriousness of literary scenes of self-killing? 'Joy within death' is the ambit of Daniel's revelatory book, which gathers instances on both sides of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643)-the work that debuted the word 'suicide'-to show this 'contrary aesthetic tendency' accreting generic force. By reckoning with the levity that animates the choice not to bear what must be borne, Joy of the Worm offers a brilliant and necessary meditation on the resources early modernity furnishes for finding pleasure in an age of destruction and setting down the burden of false hope. * Ellen MacKay, University of Chicago * Joy of the Worm is a brilliant, deeply thoughtful, conceptually agile, ethically serious, and surprisingly funny work. Before the emergence of suicide as the pathologized act we currently understand it to be, self-killing enabled a wider set of affective and aesthetic responses. Alert to the difficulty of this topic, Daniel moves deftly back and forth between our twenty-first-century present and the early modern past so that we can understand our own assumptions for what they are: historically contingent ways of framing and perhaps diminishing a fundamental human possibility. * Timothy M. Harrison, author of 'Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England' *

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Drew Daniel is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats and The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology of the English Renaissance.

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