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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.

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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

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´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

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