[D]etailed and cogent . . . . Throughout the study, textual analysis is enhanced by careful attention to the literary, political, and cultural context, and by details drawn from archival material about the writers' knowledge and discussion of melancholy traditions. Cosgrove's strident engagement with earlier critical reception is particularly noteworthy, not least as her study responds to a lack of scholarly interest in post-war Holocaust memory and melancholy, an association that she shows to be worthy of further attention. . . . The monograph is an original and serious work which provides a highly detailed perspective on post-war writing about the poetics of remembrance after the Holocaust. As such, it makes an important contribution to the extensive body of recent criticism on post-war German memory culture.

MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW

[The book's] greatest contribution is to emphasize the variety of traditions at play, in particular Christian, Greek, and Renaissance modes of melancholy discourse beyond the better-known psychological and medical definition of the term, most notably as derived from Freud. . . . Recommended.

CHOICE

The [book's] greatest strength . . . is its careful and erudite analysis of a range of thematic intricacies, such as the distinctive treatments of melancholy depending on whether the narrator (or author) speaks from the perspective of the perpetrator or the victim, as a man or a woman, as an individual or a collective, etc. Clearly, Cosgrove's analysis goes along with a keen analytical grasp of the theoretical and conceptual issues involved in the problem of melancholy. . . . The book is an important, precise, and thorough study that breaks new ground and advances our understanding of a set of major German novels in the social and cultural context of memory studies. Overall this is a graceful work of remarkable erudition that will be greatly appreciated as a landmark study about both postwar German literary history and theory, and memory discourse in the humanities.

MONATSHEFTE