In the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, writers across a range of political opinions had to reconcile their approval of martial ardour with their dread of popular violence. As a result, attempts to imagine patriotic ardour often coincided with, or coalesced with, attempts to encourage peace. This resulted in a melancholy call-to-arms. Writers linked collective support for war, or protest against it, with tranquilising communal mourning, or else focused on the wars of a lost past that preceded modern commercial and industrial relations, or else pushed the prospect of collective armed struggle for social justice stoically into an indefinite future. These strategies provided forms of moral insulation for like-minded communities. The discussion includes works by Anna Barbauld, Walter Scott, Helen Porter and Lord Byron, among others.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.

This chapter analyses how Pliny absorbs the consolatory philosophy of Seneca. It focuses on his intertextual use of two of Seneca’s epistles (98 and 99) that treat death, arguing that Ep. 98 looms behind Corellius Rufus’ decision to die (1.12), and that Regulus’ display of grief following the death of his son (4.2) echoes Seneca’s condemnation of improper mourning practice in Ep. 99. The allusions reveal Pliny’s opportunistic engagement with Seneca’s philosophical consideration of grief, agreeing and disagreeing with his epistolary predecessor depending upon the specific circumstances of the bereavement. Both his absorption and rejection of Seneca’s arguments show that he could engage and apply philosophical concepts to express his own grief or criticise other’s.

It is one of the remarkable but also unsettling characteristics of psychodynamic psychotherapy that its course is not rigidly predetermined; this allows things to emerge in therapy that neither the therapist nor patient could have anticipated. What focus the work takes and what therapeutic approaches are most useful for each patient need to be found out along the way. This does not however mean it is impossible to give direction or that there is no structure to therapy. In this chapter, we aim to provide orientation to clinicians who are embarking on their first courses of therapy. We integrate theory and technique to offer a longitudinal perspective on how matters can play out over a course of therapy. Firstly, we discuss the formation of the therapeutic alliance and the development of a psychodynamic formulation. The central part of this chapter looks at the therapeutic relationship as a vehicle for change. Finally, we discuss the late phase of therapy and the dynamics of separation from the therapist, and how this can be both a challenging but productive period.

This chapter explores the recurring mourning and funereal rites – affectively charged moments of remembrance – in Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Focusing on the subplot in which Belarius, an exiled courtier, has abducted the king’s two sons and raised them as noble savages in the wilds of Wales, this chapter argues that these scenes invite a vision of ancient British primitive indigeneity precisely in order to transcend it. The princes’ obsequies for relatives and friends give voice to their own utter lack of familial and historical memory, thus echoing both antiquarian portrayals of the ancient British and colonial portrayals of natives in the Americas and Ireland as memoryless peoples. Engaging politically and ecologically oriented work in affect studies, I interpret the rustic princes’ mourning as a national and even imperial emotion that can illuminate how, and why, Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined ancient forebears as oblivious “primitives.” By ultimately staging an “improvement” from an ahistorical condition of homegrown indigeneity, it is argued, the play translates British savagery into a civilized condition suitable for English colonization, which was then gathering speed in Virginia and Ulster.

This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell’s geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle’s metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin’s aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold’s poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry.

Ch 2: The second chapter looks at the complex confrontation of Christian lyric with death. Finality lends meaning to the life of the faithful, and lyric allows the poet and the reader to undo that death, to turn it into “love.” More concretely, Clément Marot’s word manipulations consistently use the praise of the deceased as a means of promoting the pursuit of peace, as if death on earth were unmade, at the same time, by the turning of “mort” into “amour.”

Three pivotal events took place in Iquique between 1870 and 1930: one of the key naval battles of the War of the Pacific (1879); the establishment of a parallel government that challenged president José Manuel Balmaceda’s desire for greater taxation of nitrate wealth (1891); and the massacre by the Chilean military of striking miners at the Escuela Santa María (1907). This chapter examines the rhetoric of mourning in the literature of Iquique during this period and its link to shifting alliances along national, political, and affective lines. Texts analyzed include articles by Nicolás Palacios; poems and prose by Rubén Darío, who lived in Chile between 1887 and 1889; the novel Juana Lucero (1902) by Augusto D’Halmar; and the writings of labor organizer Luis Emilio Recabarren. The chapter links mourning to questions about workers’ rights, extractivism, and “cosmopolitanism” in Latin America’s first export age – issues still under debate today in the region.

The chapter concentrates upon the wealth of early modern responses to the demise of Elizabeth I in 1603. Particular attention is played to the Petrarchan discourse of eternizing, the memorialization of the last Tudor monarch in her own lifetime, and the scriptural and mythological associations which shaped the early modern reception of Elizabeth. The continuities between textual and artistic productions during the period are explored with reference to Elizabethan iconography and there is sustained analysis in this context of published miscellanies mourning the queen shortly after her death. The discussion concludes with a consideration of how dynastic change and the strategic deployment of cultural amnesia also influenced the age’s evocation of Elizabeth in the decades after her passing.

The extended mourning for Agamemnon in the kommos scene of the Choephoroi dramatizes relationships to the dead not found previously in the trilogy. Unlike in the Agamemnon, in the kommos, death is neither an end point nor a peaceful rest. Instead, the mourners repeatedly alternate contradictory conceptualizations of Agamemnon’s existence and power in the beyond: They insist on his outraged, avenging spirit; paradoxically, they also refer to his honored place among kings in the underworld. At some points, they call on him to send his power from below; at others, they beg him to rise from the dead. None of the characters seems to know which of these possible afterlives, if any, are true. The “poetics of multiplicity” evident in the kommos affects the emotional, epistemic, and ethical aspects of the scene. The Chorus’s contrafactual image of Agamemnon as glorious king in the afterlife, jammed against their insistence on his dishonored death and burial, compels Orestes to begin the second coup d’état. It is potentially the first instance in extant Greek literature in which a fictional depiction of the afterlife motivates extreme political action.

This chapter analyses the move of historians away from text and towards the interpretation of visuals. Starting with art history’s turn to the social and the cultural, it traces the interest of historians for an ever wider group of images, including popular images. It also highlights the emergence of perspectivalism and transdisciplinarity in the field of visual history. The main bulk of the chapter is taken up with presenting a range of examples showing how the visual turn in historical writing has contributed to deconstructing national identites, class identities and racial/ethnic identities. Ranging widely across different parts of the globe it also discusses the deconstruction of religious and gender identities through visual histories that have in total contributed much towards a much higher self-reflexivity among historians when it comes to the construction of collective identities through historical writing.

What is particularly interesting in Quilt (2010) by Nicholas Royle narrating the impossible mourning of a man after the death of his beloved father, is its diverse pronominal shifts (it starts as a first-person narrative before becoming a third- then a second-person one), grammatically reflecting the slow disappearance of the first-person protagonist from the narrator’s position and then from the narrative altogether. The clearly-marked ‘you’ passages in Quilt highlight the ghostly presence of a narrator speaking on behalf of a character who is trying to keep it all together but is slowly losing it. The chapter displays that not only does the novel go down the pronominal hierarchy in the switch from first-person to third-person narrative via the second person, but it also stylistically subverts the Animacy Hierarchy through a generic ‘you’ that knits together different pockets of voices in a most experimental way. Royle’s novel is completed by an afterword calling on to the reader in a classical manner, which serves as a transition to Parts III and IV devoted to this (para)textual call to the reader/viewer.

“We think back through our mothers if we are women” Virginia Woolf famously declared in A Room of One’s Own, and she relished rescuing from obscurity women of earlier generations who had been lost to history, lost to memory. This chapter addresses the more complex relationship of Virginia Woolf with her own mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Drawing on Woolf’s diaries and letters, her unfinished memoir, her great autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse – and on Julia Duckworth Stephen’s own extant writings – the author explores Virginia Woolf’s lifelong, evolving relationship with what she called the “invisible presence” of her mother, who had died when she was a girl of thirteen.

This chapter considers the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to queer theory and literature, using James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a case study. The chapter traces the ways in which queerness – particularly queer love – is haunted by melancholia by highlighting the manner in which melancholia is inextricable from the passionate relationship between David and Giovanni, the lovers at the novel’s core. Yet Baldwin arguably also universalizes melancholia by demonstrating that all of the novel’s characters, including David’s girlfriend Hella, are deeply melancholic. Melancholia, then, is not merely a queer predicament but rather – as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also claimed – a part of the human condition. The chapter consequently draws a distinction between constitutive (existential) and context-specific (socially imposed) forms of melancholia, illustrating that queer melancholia tends to fall into the latter genre of melancholia due to the discrimination, persecution, and shame that often characterize queer lives and loves.