Melancholics in Love : Representing WomenOs Depression and Domestic Abuse

Drawing from a wide spectrum of literary and autobiographical texts from the past and present, such as Jane Austen's Emma and Tina Turner’s I, Tina, Frances L. Restuccia moves from a psychoanalytic explanation of the formation of women melancholics to the cultural co-construction of battered women.

Melancholics in Love: Representing Women’s Depression and Domestic Abuse joins psychoanalytic theories of melancholia and mourning (Freud, Kristeva) with cultural studies and its attention to power relations in cultural practice. It is interested in the borderland between the psychoanalytic and the cultural, where desire is imbricated with power and individual psyches with cultural formations. Drawing from a wide spectrum of literary and autobiographical texts from the past and present, such as Jane Austen''s Emma and Tina Turner’s I, Tina, Frances L. Restuccia moves from a psychoanalytic explanation of the formation of women melancholics to the cultural co-construction of battered women. A fascinating, provocative, and highly original study in melancholia and domestic abuse, Melancholics in Love will be of special interest to anyone concerned with social justice for battered women or the politics of representation of violence against women.