Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One’s Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet’s own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"—we might refer to it as depression—and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive.David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age’s most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning.

Product Description: In this innovative hybrid of biography, memoir, and criticism, Eric G. Wilson describes how John Keats gave him solace during a bout of mental illness in spring 2012. While on a tour of the principal sites in Keats’s life—ranging from his London medical school to the small room in Rome where he died—Wilson discovered analogies between the poet’s troubles and his own...read more

Product Description: In German Studies the literary phenomenon of melancholy, which has a longstanding and diverse history in European letters, has typically been associated with the Early Modern and Baroque periods, Romanticism, and the crisis of modernity...read more

Product Description: The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, is one of the greatest works of early modern English prose writing, yet it has received little substantial literary criticism in recent years. This study situates Robert Burton's complex work within three related contexts: religious, medical and literary/rhetorical...read more

Product Description: Melancholy has become a central theme of German literature since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The rapidly changing sociopolitical circumstances of the post-1989 period and the continued burden of the Nazi past have directly contributed to this upsurge in melancholy themes...read more

Product Description: Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication...read more

Product Description: Using the ideas of Kristeva and Lacan, this study examines works by four female authors to demonstrate that hysteria and melancholy/melancholia can be viewed as discourse and style when analyzing literary texts. This present study investigates how literature configures and gives voice to hysteria and melancholy as discursive modes and textual moods in selected works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Zelda Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes...read more

Product Description: Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering...read more

Product Description: The term "melancholy" defies clear definition. In the historical variability and in the modern omnipresence of the melancholy-concept remains a great potential that this collection of writings is dedicated to tapping into. The formulation between Attitude and Discourse demarcates the space between rhetorical stylization and academic argumentation in which melancholy has always been situated and from which the concept continues to derive its dynamic role not only in the history of artistic creativity but in the history of ideas as well...read more

Product Description: How the story of depression gets told in print, on screen, and online.Depression and Narrative examines stories of depression in the context of recent scholarship on illness and narrative, which up to this point has largely focused on physical illness and disability...read more

Product Description: The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, Jonathan Flatley argues, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them...read more

Product Description: In National Melancholy, Breitwieser offers close readings of important American writers (Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Sarah Orne Jewett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac) who were struggling to understand mourning, both in their own experience and in the abstract...read more

Product Description: The Will of the People is an incisive, in-depth look at Winston Churchill’s lifelong commitment to parliamentary democracy. First elected at twenty-five, Churchill was still in the House of Commons sixty-four years later. By far the largest part of his life – of his working days and nights – was spent in the cut and thrust of debate in the service of the people, whose instrument he believed Parliament to be...read more

Product Description: In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings...read more

Product Description: During the so-called "Age of Melancholy," many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war...read more

Product Description: This lively intellectual biography of the second half of Coleridge's life argues that the poet, in his mature work, reveals a brilliant though troubled genius for conveying the ambiguities of psychological limbo.            Asserting that the later poetry is the key element of Coleridge's career, Eric G...read more