Melancholic Life - by Jonathan C Williams (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A study of how 18th-century British literary writers deployed melancholic feeling to draw a complex web of relations between the embodied self and its historical present.

Melancholic Life argues that what binds 18th-century melancholics such as the speaker of James Thomson, Sarah Fielding's David Simple, or William Cowper is a belief that critical thought is worth voicing whether or not it contributes to social change. That belief converges with 18th-century ideas of sentiment and loneliness, but it also syncs up in surprising ways with theoretical models of political subjectivity that emerge in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jonathan C. Williams thus proposes a new way of thinking about the critical importance of literary melancholy in the 18th century: as the language of melancholic social criticism, a solitary protest against exploitative features of social life, including global commerce and print capitalism. That form of melancholic life helps to trace a genealogy from Robert Burton's Democritus to Defoe's Crusoe to the Romantic period; it also yokes the early capitalist historical moment of Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling to the post-1968 modernity that characterizes the work of Theodor W. Adorno.

As Melancholic Life shows, melancholic social criticism persists even when there is little hope. That spirit of persistence becomes a condition of literary expression in the 18th century. Attention to melancholic expression reveals resonances not only to medical, religious, poetic, and philosophical language, but also between 18th-century thinkers and your own historical moment.

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

About the Author