The Literature of Melancholia

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction

   1. Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction

      • Martin Middeke, Christina Wald

      Pages 1-19

3. The Melancholic Tradition, Creativity and Gender: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 21-21

      PDF

   2. Yet Once More: Melancholia and Amnesia in Milton’s Lycidas

      • Tobias Döring

      Pages 23-34

   3. Male Pregnancies, Virgin Births, Monsters of the Mind: Early Modern Melancholia and (Cross-)Gendered Constructions of Creativity

      • Anne-Julia Zwierlein

      Pages 35-49

   4. Mourning and Melancholia in England and Its Transatlantic Colonies: Examples of Seventeenth-Century Female Appropriations

      • Gabriele Rippl

      Pages 50-66

   5. ‘To pictur’d Regions and imagin’d Worlds’: Female Melancholic Writing and the Poems of Mary Leapor

      • Sabine Blackmore

      Pages 67-83

4. Nature, History and Nostalgia: The Melancholia of Romanticism and Beyond

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 85-85

      PDF

   2. ‘The dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open’: The Recision of the Male Melancholic Genius in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

      • Felix Sprang

      Pages 87-100

   3. ‘They Came, They Cut Away My Tallest Pines’: Tennyson and the Melancholy of Modernity

      • Andrew Gibson

      Pages 101-115

   4. The Melancholy of History: The French Revolution and European Historiography

      • Peter Fritzsche

      Pages 116-129

   5. Commercializing Melancholy: The National Trust

      • Christoph Ehland, Stephan Kohl

      Pages 130-144

5. Melancholia and (Post-)Colonialism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 145-145

      PDF

   2. Melancholia in the South Pacific: The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travel Writing

      • Kirsten Sandrock

      Pages 147-159

   3. The Secret of the Father in the Colonial Secret: Rosa Praed’s ‘Weird Melancholy’

      • Jennifer Rutherford

      Pages 160-172

   4. Modernist Melancholia and Time: The Synchronicity of the Non-Synchronic in Freud, Tylor and Conrad

      • Anne Enderwitz

      Pages 173-186

   5. The Closed Circle of Britain’s Postcolonial Melancholia

      • Paul Gilroy

      Pages 187-204

6. Postmodernism and Post-Melancholia? Ethics and Aesthetics in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 205-205

      PDF

   2. Working at the Seams: Howard Barker’s Tragic Trauerspiel

      • Elizabeth Sakellaridou

      Pages 207-222

   3. Melancholia and Mourning Animals

      • Juliana Schiesari

      Pages 223-239

This collection analyzes philosophical, psycho-analytic and aesthetic contexts of the discourse of melancholia in British and postcolonial literature and culture and seeks to trace the multi-faceted phenomenon of melancholia from the early modern period to the present. Texts discussed range from Shakespeare and Milton to Coetzee and Barker.

• aesthetics
• culture
• English literature
• Europe
• Great Britain
• John Milton
• novel
• poem
• postmodernism
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Tradition
• William Shakespeare

'This book is an ambitious engagement with a major topic of psychological and cultural importance. Its aims are wide-ranging, covering key writers and topics between the early modern period and our own time. Using often sophisticated theoretical approaches, the contributors have important arguments to make both in terms of the historical analysis of melancholia and of melancholic texts and tendencies, and of the continuity between historical figures and objects and such present day preoccupations as depression, loss and nostalgia. The result is a rich mix of approaches and a convincingly nuanced series of distinctions in our experience and understanding of the merry and the melancholic.' - Allan Ingram, Professor of English, University of Northumbria, UK

• Augsburg University, Germany

  Martin Middeke, Christina Wald

• University of Johannesburg, South Africa

  Martin Middeke

SABINE BLACKMORE Humboldt-Universität, Germany TOBIAS DÖRING Professor of English Literature, LMU Munich, Germany CHRISTOPH EHLAND, Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Paderborn, Germany ANNE ENDERWITZ Post-Doctoral Fellow, Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany PETER FRITZSCHE Professor of History at the University of Illinois, USA JOHAN GEERTSEMA National University of Singapore ANDREW GIBSON Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK PAUL GILROY Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, UK STEPHAN KOHL Professor Emeritus of English Cultures and Literature, University of Würzburg, Germany GABRIELE RIPPL Professor of Literatures in English, University of Berne, Switzerland JENNIFER RUTHERFORD Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Flinder, Austria ELIZABETH SAKELLARIDOU Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece KIRSTEN SANDROCK Assistant Professor at the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany JULIANA SCHIESARI Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis, USA FELIX C. H. SPRANG Assistant Professor of English Literature, University of Hamburg, Germany PIETER VERMEULEN Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Flemish Research Council (FWO), University of Ghent, Belgium ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Germany

Policies and ethics