Melancholic Life: Literary Expression and the Experience of History from Burton to Keats (Bloomsbury, 2025) traces the long historical process by which the feeling of melancholia transforms from a medical condition into a distinctly political feeling. It argues that the eighteenth century constitutes a pivotal historical moment for our understanding of the kinds of political possibilities that might or might not follow from the lived experience of melancholic feeling. Melancholy's eighteenth-century importance, this book suggests, lies in its character of minimal efficacy: a form of critique that persists even when meaningful political action seems impossible. 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 our own historical moment.

Jonathan C. Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University. He is the author of Melancholic Life: Literary Expression and the Experience of History from Burton to Keats (Bloomsbury, 2025), and his work has appeared in a number of other venues, including Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.

Joshua Bartlett is an assistant professor in the Department of English at High Point University, where he writes, teaches, and researches in the fields of early and nineteenth-century American literature, American poetry and poetics, and the environmental humanities. His scholarly work has appeared in publications such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.