Skip to content

Opening book details…

Can I read The Anatomy of Melancholy on EtoBox?

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton, Robert; Jackson, Holbrook is a work of fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Anatomy of Melancholy about?

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the great, but unclassifiable, prose works in English literature: diverting, delightfully rambling and filled with recondite learning and peculiar facts and speculations. Burton, frustrated at the stagnant, disorderly society in which he found himself, became convinced that the problems of England lay in its inclination to melancholy. This is the starting-point, or pretext, for a hugely wide-ranging survey of the causes, descriptions (and cures) of melancholy. Burton's unsystematic approach to his subject contributes greatly to its charm and interest, for much of it is composed of digressions that are, in effect, self-contained essays on all manner of subjects: cosmology, religious fanaticism, devils and spirits, food, love and sex.Robert Burton was a seventeenth-century academic. He lived the life of a humanist scholar and college bachelor, reading widely and taking undemanding donnish exercise: fishing, walking and generally pleasing himself. He liked to think of himself as a latter-day Democritus, the Greek thinker who was styled 'the laughing philosopher'.

Who reads The Anatomy of Melancholy?

It is typically read by readers looking for immersive, entertainment-first reading.

Common subject areas: fiction, literature, genre fiction.

Author
Burton, Robert; Jackson, Holbrook
Publisher
E.P. Dutton, J.M. Dent
Published
1932
Language
EN
ISBN
9781780942209
Category
work of fiction
Subjects
Literary Fiction, Psychology, Fiction
Rating
4.17 / 5 (936 ratings)
Updated
2026-03-14

Other editions & translations

More by Burton, Robert; Jackson, Holbrook

Browse all works by Burton, Robert; Jackson, Holbrook

Similar books