In the following essay, Fish detects a unity of style and substance in Burton's frequent digressions and shifts of subject in The Anatomy of Melancholy.
In the essay below, Webber discusses how the “I” persona of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy combines the two distinct modes of life and art by manipulating the reader through an anecdotal and gossip-oriented analysis of sources rather than through a methodical investigation of the facts.
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...
In the excerpt below, Vicari argues that the The Anatomy of Melancholy is best understood not as a medical treatise, but as a sermon. Vicari links the style of the work to the oral tradition and notes Burton's progressive treatment of melancholy as not merely a malady but a sin.
In the following essay, Chapple examines how Burton's interest in the burgeoning field of cartography influenced The Anatomy of Melancholy, primarily focusing on the “foolscap” world map described in the preface.
In the following essay, Sawday describes The Anatomy of Melancholy as the foundation of a theory of knowledge that never fully developed, particularly after the formation of The Royal Society in 1660 with its markedly different approach to scientific investigation.
In the essay below, Colie argues that The Anatomy of Melancholy is deliberately paradoxical in many ways, including its contradictory subject matter, its conflicting genres, and its juxtaposition of opposites. Burton's “fragmenting of the categories of phenomena” in this manner, and his “identification of cause, symptom, and cure,” she maintains, universalizes melancholy “into the whole condition of humanity.”
In the essay below, Schleiner addresses Burton's treatment of same-sex relationships in The Anatomy of Melancholy, examining how Burton's use of the rhetorical device praeteritio might distinguish his own perspective from among his many sources.
In the following excerpt, Hodges considers The Anatomy of Melancholy to be a treatise poised between humanism and rationalism, focusing on how the work countenances the coexistence of madness and reason in seventeenth-century thought—a condition rejected by the eighteenth-century quest for “objective knowledge.”
In the essay below, Wong considers The Anatomy of Melancholy in the context of the encyclopedic tradition, suggesting that Burton's self-deprecating portrait of the scholar is more subversive and more modern than has generally been assumed.
In the essay below, Gardiner explores the dimensions of Burton's psychological method in The Anatomy of Melancholy, concluding that “Burton digests his medieval and Renaissance science and other material available to him to create a humanistic psychology that is both comprehensive and reasonably coherent.”
In the following essay, Holmes discusses the influence of The Anatomy of Melancholy on English literature and comments on the massive breadth of the treatise.
In the following essay, Tillman compares Burton's satiric style in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to Horatian and Juvenalian satire, emphasizing the classical origins of the work's rhetorical personae rather than seventeenth-century concerns about the self and the stability of the authorial voice.
In the essay below, Fox examines the digressions from the conventional structure of the medical treatise in The Anatomy of Melancholy, proposing that the tension between the digressions and the more straightforward sections reflects an ambivalence about the reliability of knowledge.
In this excerpt originally recorded in his journal in 1776, Boswell relates an anecdote which demonstrates the value that Samuel Johnson placed upon The Anatomy of Melancholy.
