De la maladie a l'ecriture

The study sets out to examine how the concept of melancholy evolved from its usage in medical discourse to its usage in literature. How can we explain the fact that a term referring to a pathological condition close to madness and marked by extreme introversion and distraction should have become a key concept characterizing the expressive condition of the Romantic writer? Stripping away the modern usages of the term, the study adopts a rigorously historical perspective and analyzes a number of texts that cast a revealing light on the articulation of a philosophical and poetic purchase on the concept of melancholy and its pathological semantics.