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.

Autorentext
SABINE BLACKMORE Humboldt-Universität, Germany TOBIAS DÖRING Professor of English Literature, LMU Munich, Germany CHRISTOPH EHLAND, Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Paderborn, Germany ANNE ENDERWITZ Post-Doctoral Fellow, Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany PETER FRITZSCHE Professor of History at the University of Illinois, USA JOHAN GEERTSEMA National University of Singapore ANDREW GIBSON Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK PAUL GILROY Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, UK STEPHAN KOHL Professor Emeritus of English Cultures and Literature, University of Würzburg, Germany GABRIELE RIPPL Professor of Literatures in English, University of Berne, Switzerland JENNIFER RUTHERFORD Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Flinder, Austria ELIZABETH SAKELLARIDOU Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece KIRSTEN SANDROCK Assistant Professor at the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany JULIANA SCHIESARI Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis, USA FELIX C. H. SPRANG Assistant Professor of English Literature, University of Hamburg, Germany PIETER VERMEULEN Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Flemish Research Council(FWO), University of Ghent, Belgium ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Germany

Inhalt
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