A Field Guide to Melancholy

A Field Guide to Melancholy
Author: Jacky Bowring
Publisher: No Exit Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2008
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

A depressive illness or a passing feeling? Mental detachment or a precursor to genius? Melancholy is a critical part of what it is to be human, yet everything from Prozac to self-help psychology books seem intent on removing all signs of sadness from contemporary existence. Complex and contradictory, melancholy's presence weaves through the histories of both science and art. This guide surveys literature, art, film, music and architecture, finding melancholy everywhere it turns.

A User's Guide to Melancholy

A User's Guide to Melancholy
Author: Mary Ann Lund
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2021-02-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108982581

A User's Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton's encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) as a guide to one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and afflicting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton's Anatomy is perhaps the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever written. Engaging with the rich cultural and literary framework of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures through Burton's writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of melancholy - from the man who was afraid to urinate in case he drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel - as a way into exploring the many facets of this mental affliction. A User's Guide to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes to contemporary discussions about wellbeing by revealing the earlier history of mental health conditions.

Melancholy and the Landscape

Melancholy and the Landscape
Author: Jacky Bowring
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2016-07-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317366956

Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth-century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness. The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.

Melancholy, Love, and Time

Melancholy, Love, and Time
Author: Peter Toohey
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2004-01-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780472113026

An examination of the effects and meaning of emotional states of distress in ancient literature

Melancholy and the Landscape

Melancholy and the Landscape
Author: Jacky Bowring
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2016-07-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317366948

Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth-century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness. The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.

Melancholic Modalities

Melancholic Modalities
Author: Denise Gill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0190495014

Denise Gill analyzes how the melancholies intentionally cultivated by Turkish classical musicians, typically dismissed as the remnants of Ottoman nostalgia, emerge as reparative, pleasurable, and spiritually redeeming. Melancholic Modalities intervenes in debates about music and affect, and offers new, innovative methodologies of rhizomatic analysis and bi-aurality for researchers.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2006-06-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101118717

“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles Times From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.

The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the English (Second Edition)

The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the English (Second Edition)
Author: Sarah Lyall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393358011

New York Times Bestseller “An exquisite, hilarious and devastating dissection.” —Malcolm Gladwell Why do the English keep apologizing? Why are they so unenthusiastic about enthusiasm? Why does rain surprise them? When are they being ironic, and how can you tell? Even after eighteen years in London, New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall remained perplexed and intrigued by its curious inhabitants and their curious customs. She’s since returned to the United States, but this distillation of incisive—and irreverent—insights, now updated with a new preface, is just as illuminating today. And perhaps even more so, in the wake of Brexit and the attendant national identity crisis. While there may be no easy answer to the question of how, exactly, to understand the English, The Anglo Files—part anthropological field study, part memoir—helps point the way.

The Aesthetics of Melancholia

The Aesthetics of Melancholia
Author: Luis F. López González
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-12-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192675354

This book explores the intersection between medicine and literature in medieval Iberian literature and culture. Its overarching argument is that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iberian authors revalorized the interconnection between the body, the mind, and the soul in light of the evolving epistemology of medicine. Prior to the reintroduction of classical medical treatises through Arab authors into European cultures, mental disorders and bodily diseases were primarily attributed to moral corruption, demonic influence, and superstition. The introduction of novel regimens of health as well as treatises on melancholia into academic institutions and into the cultural landscape provided the tools for newly minted authors to understand that psychosomatic illnesses stemmed from malfunctions of the body's biochemical composition. This book demonstrates that the earliest books written in the Iberian vernaculars contain the seeds that effect the shift from a theocentric worldview to a humanistic one. The volume features close readings of multiple texts, including medical treatises and religious writings, and King Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa Maria, Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor, and Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor. Even though these texts differ in literary genre, rhetorical strategy, and even purpose, this study argues that they collectively employ humoral pathology and melancholic discourses as a means of underscoring the frailty and transience of human life by showing how somatic conditions sicken the body, mind, and soul unto death.