The Literature of Melancholia Early Modern to Postmodern

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.

MARTIN MIDDEKE is Professor of English Literature at Augsburg University, Germany,and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

CHRISTINA WALD is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Augsburg University, Germany. Her previouspublicationsinclude Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia (Palgrave, 2007).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction; M.Middeke& C.Wald
PART I: THE MELANCHOLIC TRADITION, CREATIVITY, AND GENDER: CARVING AUTHORIAL POSITIONS FROM THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Yet IOnce More: Melancholia and Amnesia in Milton's Lycidas; T.Döring
Male Pregnancies, Virgin Births, Monsters of the Mind: Early Modern Melancholia and (Cross-)Gendered Constructions of Creativity; A-J Zwierlein
Mourning and Melancholia in England and Its Transatlantic Colonies: Examples of Seventeenth-Century Female Appropriations; G.Rippl
'To Pictur'd Regions and Imagin'd Worlds': Female Melancholic Writing and the Poems of Mary Leapor; S.Blackmore
PART II: NATURE, HISTORY AND NOSTALGIA: THE MELANCHOLIA OF ROMANTICISM AND BEYOND
'The Dark Bottomless Abyss, that Lies Under Our Feet, had Yawned Open': The Rescission of the Male Melancholic Genius in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; F.Sprang
'They Came, they Cut Away my Tallest Pines': Tennyson and the Melancholy of Modernity; A.Gibson
The Melancholy of History: The French Revolution and European Historiography; P.Fritzsche
Commercialising Melancholy: The National Trust; C.Ehland& S.Kohl
PART III: MELANCHOLIA AND (POST-)COLONIALISM: FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Melancholia in the South Pacific: The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson's Travel Writing; K.Sandrock
The Secret of the Father in the Colonial Secret: Rosa Praed's 'Weird Melancholy'; J.Rutherford
Modernist Melancholia and Time: The Synchronicity of the Non-Synchronic in Freud, Tylor and Conrad; A.Enderwitz
The Closed Circle of Britain's Postcolonial Melancholia; P.Gilroy
PART IV: POSTMODERNISM AND POST-MELANCHOLIA? ETHICS AND AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
Working at the Seams: Howard Barker's Tragic Trauerspiel; E.Sakellaridou
Melancholia and Mourning Animals; J.Schiesari
Melancholic Consolation? J. M. Coetzee, Irony, and the Aesthetics of the Sublime; J.Geertsema
The Novel after Melancholia: On Tom McCarthy's Remainder and David Mitchell's Ghostwritten; P.Vermeulen
Works Cited
Index