Dr. or Prof. Jonathan C. Williams

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...