Melancholic Life, Aristotle to Keats

A number of writers, going back to Plato and Aristotle, have had much to say about melancholy, but in the Western tradition, few have agreed on the question of what melancholy actually is. Looking mostly at the British literary archive from the Renaissance to the Romantic period, this course addresses a number of questions about the place of melancholic feeling in the literary archive: what is melancholy? Why are so many writers so drawn to it? What is the connection between the melancholic individual and the historical moment that they inhabit? We'll begin with some representations of melancholy in philosophy, literary theory, and visual art, and then we'll move on to some literary texts in which the feeling assumes a particularly prominent role.