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  • Published: 10 October 2023
  • ISBN: 9780141192284
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 1376
  • RRP: $50.00

The Anatomy of Melancholy




A guidebook to melancholia or depression, and a masterly, all-encompassing examination of the human condition

The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the seventeenth-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 uncategorizable works of all time - can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.

  • Published: 10 October 2023
  • ISBN: 9780141192284
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 1376
  • RRP: $50.00

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

Also by Robert Burton

See all

Praise for The Anatomy of Melancholy

The best book ever written

Nick Lezard, Guardian

The greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing

Llewelyn Powys

Burton's masterpiece. It is one of the finest prose works in English . . . it is funny, a laugh-aloud book, one that seems to convey the character of its writer with a rare clarity. It is an ode to reading that overflows with allusions and quotations, making it a book that feels, at times, as if it is about the whole of human knowledge. In its wonderfully capacious digressiveness, it pulsates with a life force that is, in itself, a charm against the terrors, the fears and the loneliness of melancholy

The Guardian

This is the best popular edition ever produced of one of the most amusing books in our language, a masterpiece of scholarship. It belongs on the shelves of everyone who loves English literature and all those who aspire to do so

The Critic