In his literary works Goethe engages profoundly with various manifestations of melancholy. Highly remarkable is the subtlety with which he takes up ancient, medieval, and contemporary concepts of melancholy, the accuracy with which he models the protagonists of his works on these patterns, and the range of his reflections on the possibilities of an existence free of melancholy. The present study is the first to examine Goethe's literary works in the context of a culture-historical problematic of major significance for the late 18th and early 19th century.