Lyons, Bridget Gellert. “The Anatomy of Melancholy as Literature.” In Voices of Melancholy: Studies in literary treatments of melancholy in Renaissance England, pp. 113-48. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.

In the excerpt below, Lyons examines the relations of Burton's work to other literary and expository works on melancholy and asserts that “one of the main achievements of the Anatomy as a work of literature is to portray the melancholy mind in action, even while it is occupied with melancholy as a formal subject.”

Burton and English Literature

The most ambitious literary treatment of melancholy in the seventeenth century was The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton's life's work, which first appeared in 1621 and which he revised continually until his death in 1640. The constant, obsessive revisions of this long work give us one important clue about it: it is highly contrived, and, in its author's eyes, a work of art of...