Melancholic Life: Literary Expression and the Experience of History from Burton to Keats

Description: Argues that 18th-century British literary writers deployed melancholic feeling to draw a complex web of relations between the embodied self and its historical present.

Brief description: Jonathan C. Williams is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Bilkent University, Turkey. His work has appeared in publications such as Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, and Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700.

Review Quotes:

"The lonely have long been credited with special insight into the world from which they are separated. Melancholic Life expands this insight by considering melancholy as an emotion of social criticism within 18th-century literature. Far from a passive feeling, melancholy becomes a state through which to know the world and its problems better. A thought-provoking and insightful take on the political work our
feelings can do." --Katie Barclay, Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Australia

"Melancholic Life joins the recent body of scholarship bringing a certain political force to the concept and experience of melancholy in the long 18th century. This enjoyable book brings a fresh perspective to familiar faces and works, with a hint to what melancholy can mean for our own times." --Clark Lawlor, Professor of English Literature, University of Northumbria, UK