SOURCE: Toal, Catherine. “Contemporary American Melancholy.” Journal of European Studies 33, nos. 3-4 (December 2003): 305-22.

In the following essay, Toal analyzes the representations of melancholy in The Corrections and two other American novels, arguing that the respective authors find problematic the cultural threat to their definitions of masculinity.

Any discussion of the relationship between ‘melancholy’ and contemporary literature must take account not only of a continuing theoretical and philosophical debate surrounding the category, but of a recent voluminous expansion—encompassing, most notably for literary studies, the genre of the ‘memoir’—in popular discourse on ‘depression’.¹ As Abigail Cheever argues, though the development of ‘cures’ for depression might have been expected to dissolve its cultural importance, the resulting separation between the illness and its symptoms established it, with the help of the memoir, as ‘an identity in its own right independent from any particular characteristics or behaviours’.² In contrast to...