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Melancholy, said Wordsworth, is a "luxurious gloom of choice". Unlike depression, we choose to be melancholy, paradoxically deriving pleasure from feeling faintly sad. "Melancholy slows things, allows for percolation, facilitates solitude and solace for imagination," says Jacky Bowring in this dispassionate defence of the malady, madness, affectation - melancholy has been called many things over the centuries, but somehow eludes definition.

It is not strictly grief or sorrow or mourning, explains Bowring, but a complex constellation of moods. In modern times, psychiatrists have diagnosed it as "abnormal bereavement" or "psychotic depression", inelegant solutions for something that Bowring seeks to reclaim as "a rich dimension of human existence".

She is an advocate of melancholy, convinced of "the benefits of the pursuit of sadness". She rejects the medicalisation of our mental wellbeing by health professionals and sidesteps concerns about a global increase in mental illness by insisting that melancholy is not depression. Only once does she ask the pertinent question: "Is the increase in melancholy an authentic response to the pressures of contemporary existence, where it might be considered a pervasive mood?" Could it be that the politics of fear creates a media-induced state of national melancholy? And if so, to what end? Bowring mentions several philosophers, but a notable omission is Spinoza, who regarded melancholy as evil, because it reduces our power to act.

Is melancholy a sickness of the west, something we bequeathed to the rest of the world, like smallpox? Not at all, says Bowring, who reveals that melancholy is universal. Alongside the more familiar ennui of the French and Weltschmerz of the Germans, she looks at the Chinese bei qiu, the Japanese kanashii, the Portuguese saudade, the Russian toska, the Spanish duende and the Turkish hüzün. It appears that every culture knows what melancholy means, even if it's hard to pin down in any one language.

In the arts, it would seem, melancholy reigns supreme. Thanks in large part to the legacy of late romanticism, a questionable connection between melancholy and literary genius continues to this day. It became a feigned literary affectation as early as the 16th century. "Oh, it's your only fine humour, sir, your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit, sir," says Jonson's amateur poet in Every Man in His Humour. "I am melancholy myself divers times, sir, and then do I no more but take your pen and paper presently, and overflow you your half a score, or a dozen of sonnets, at a sitting."

In film, Bowring singles out Antonioni, Bergman and Tarkovsky as notably melancholy; in art, Edward Hopper, and Rachel Whiteread's Ghost; in popular music, Tom Waits and Nick Cave; in classical music, Hildegard of Bingen, Messiaen and Górecki. She also discusses the highly effective use of decayed film stock in avant-garde movies such as James Elaine's Melancholia and Bill Morrison's Decasia, as well as the unique kind of melancholy evoked by literary works which employ grainy black and white photographs to evoke a mood of loss and yearning, such as André Breton's Nadja and WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

This thoughtful and sensitive book remains a survey of the scene rather than a definitive study. However, Bowring has succeeded in her aspiration to create something like an Observer's Guide to melancholy. Melancholy assumes many guises, she explains, each anatomised here: religious melancholy, love melancholy, the melancholy of nostalgia or of boredom (acedia), and a whole tradition of "heroic melancholy" of which Batman is a recent exemplar. There is even what Walter Benjamin called "Left melancholy", whereby a leftist with a mournful attachment to a dead idea becomes an in-activist.

Ian Pindar

The Guardian

FULL REVIEW

Dylan J. Trigg

Emotion, Space and Society

FULL REVIEW

Rather than pinpointing a definition for the enigmatic feeling of melancholy, Jacky Bowring traces its history, its manifestations in culture and arts, as well as its positive and negative connotations in this inclusive guide. She communicates like a battering ram at times; the book is so dense with scholars' quotes and to-ing and fro-ing about how psychiatrists classify something as subjective as melancholy, that it becomes difficult to engage with. Bowring shines, however, when dealing with the lexicon surrounding melancholy, breaking down allied terms such as nostalgia and pathos; and she creates a lively picture of the way melancholy is expressed in culture around the world. This approach continues in her study of melancholy in culture where Nick Cave, Tom Waits and even Batman are explored as figures associated with the special strand of sadness. In these lighter moments, A Field Guide To Melancholy is immediate and pensive, taking an identifiable approach to a feeling that we all indulge in.

Zena Alkayat

Metro

FULL REVIEW

Early in A Field Guide to Melancholy, author Jacky Bowring makes the first of a few references to Robert Burton’s 1621 tome The Anatomy of Melancholy, stating that ‘rather than achieving any kind of precision,’ the 783 pages of its first edition only ‘served to further emphasize the complexity of melancholy.’ As its title makes clear, Bowring’s carefully structured book is more modest in aim and more sympathetic to its subject – it aims to ‘extol the benefits of the pursuit of sadness, and question the obsession with happiness in contemporary society.’

In doing so, Bowring avoids the biliousness that dates back to ninth-century characterisations of melancholy, instead favouring a gentle instructive tone that, while academic in basis, is never sterile. Her field guide is a particular one, by no means definitive – in the realm of contemporary music, for example, she call upon the Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, and especially Nick Cave as exemplars and never mentions a perhaps more famous Pope of Mope. In the realms of cinema, she foregrounds Ingmar Bergman, but still has time for less obvious and perhaps more compelling figures such as Tacita Dean. Though he enters and exits the text seemingly at whim, in some ways the most resplendent melancholic species is the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran, who might very well be the true Oscar Wilde of misery thanks to a Bible-size collection of primary aphorisms. Bowring’s book is a worthy introduction to Cioran, and that is but one of its merits.

Huston

San Francisco Guardian

FULL REVIEW

This quietly elegant book is a piercing lexicon of the enigmatic and elusive human condition known as 'melancholy'. Bowring is associate professor of landscape architecture at Lincoln University. Her cool-eyed handbook, published in the UK and winning approval in the Guardian, acknowledges and champions the benefits of the pursuit of sadness and urges us to 'joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world'. It examines the influence of melancholy on such diverse fields as medicine, literature, art, psychology and philosophy. With stirring themes of loss and time, the unflinchingly downcast photographs of Laurence Aberhart that illustrate the book distil the sombre joys of melancholy.

Guy Somerset

New Zealand Listener, Best Books of 2009