The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton

£25.00

In stock

‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the 17th-century English priest and scholar. It ‘opens and cuts up’ the condition of melancholy, or depression as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional topics, including goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, alcohol and kissing. Burton believed that reading was a cure for melancholy, and so the book itself – one of the most unique and uncategorisable works of all time – can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.

ISBN: 9780141192284 Category:

Description

‘The best book ever written’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Robert Burton’s labyrinthine, beguiling, playful masterpiece is his attempt to ‘anatomize and cut up’ every aspect of the condition of melancholy, from which he had suffered throughout his life. Ranging over beauty, digestion, the planets, alcohol, goblins, kissing, poetry and the restorative power of books, among many other things, The Anatomy of Melancholy has fascinated figures from Samuel Johnson to Jorge Luis Borges since the seventeenth century, and remains an incomparable examination of the human condition in all its flawed, endless variety.

Edited with an introduction by Angus Gowland

Additional information

Weight 1.227 kg
Dimensions 23.4 × 15.3 × 5.6 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

1424

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

828.308 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K

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