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.

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.

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 theSublime; J.Geertsema The Novel after Melancholia: On Tom McCarthy's Remainder and David Mitchell's Ghostwritten; P.Vermeulen Works Cited Index