The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern

by M. Middeke (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349333073
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/01/2011
Edition description:	1st ed. 2011
Pages:	271
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

'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

From the Publisher