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Birgit Capelle. Time in American and East Asian Thinking: A Comparative Study of Temporality in American Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, and (Zen) Buddhist Thought

new spokespersons for a new British identity constituted through cross-cultural relations in a globalized world. In this sense, George Michael’s appeal to the audience during his performance at the closing ceremony – “Remember, right now you are at the centre of the universe” – did not hark back nostalgically to an England as the centre of her empire but rather stressed a moment of relationality and connectedness across cultures and beyond nations. Beside this current context of the Olympic Games for which the collection provides such an instructive background (at least for this reader), The Literature of Melancholia clearly speaks to many cultural phenomena, past and contemporary. The experience of loss and grief is a pervasive human experience with which we have to come to terms. Hence melancholia is a central aspect of many discourses, ranging from anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, art and literature to the fields of gender theory, postcolonial theory and animal studies. While taking mostly literary manifestations of melancholia as its object, the rich diversity of approaches makes this collection a valuable contribution beyond the field of English literary and cultural studies. With such an interdisciplinary readership in mind, however, one could have wished not for more variety but for more depth: given the necessary brevity of each contribution resulting from the great number of essays (as well as Anglo-American publishing conventions), a few of them do not seem to get beyond a cursory overview. And while Freud is indisputably the central reference point for any work on melancholia, the recurrent invocation of Freud (in those cases at least where it remains merely an invocation) does seem a bit repetitive after a while, especially given the lucid summary in the introduction (7). Yet these are minor structural infelicities that cannot mar the overall impression that The Literature of Melancholia is an important, immensely readable contribution to a central discourse of Western culture and, increasingly, beyond.