This is an original research project on two apparently very different writers, Keats and Kafka, brought together by the idea of melancholy. The project traces the history of the idea of melancholy and considers the relevance of melancholy to the two authors, in their personal lives and writings. The project analyses the sources of the two authors’ melancholy, their different responses to it, and finally enquires whether they have managed to transcend it, especially through creative writing. The conclusion on Keats’s embrace of melancholy and Kafka’s vain grappling with it then broadens up to the different tenors of the Romantic and Modernist age, which gives the project a further scope. The reading of the text is keenly insightful and the critical analysis dexterous. The whole project stands out in its originality, in-depth reading, and the daring scope it attempts at.

Melancholy, which perhaps is more frequently referred to as depression in modern days, originated from the Greek word “black bile”. The fashionability of this medical term persisted for centuries, from the ancient Greek period to the Modernist period. This concept gained an indispensable position in literary history, particularly in the Renaissance, the Romantic and the Modern eras. It is also an important aesthetic idea in John Keats’s and Franz Kafka’s literary creation. Living in an era of transition and chaos, both Kafka and Keats led a life inseparable from the notion of melancholy. This essay consists of three sections. The first section investigates the embodiment of melancholy in their works and its source, with emphasis on a biographical approach to establish the interrelationship between the origins of melancholy on the fictional level and on the level of the reality. The second section focuses on the response and remedy of melancholic instances in the works of Keats and Kafka. In the third section of this study, key themes addressed in the previous two sections would be juxtaposed to analyze the significance of melancholy to their literary careers. By comparing the two authors’ attempts to transcend melancholy and their different views on literature, it is hoped that the third part may shed light on the differences and resonance of the notion of melancholy in the Romantic period and the Modernist period.

As a student who has studied literature for almost four years, I am very grateful that we were given the chance to work on this independent research project and to try our hands at different research forms and methods in our final year of undergraduate studies. By granting us a high degree of autonomy in almost every aspect of the project, which includes the selection of topic and the research methodology, the design of this course inspires innovation, critical thinking and reflective contemplation on inter-disciplinary issues. It is an opportunity for us to experiment with our wildest ideas and scholarly potential through revisiting, integrating and remodifying what we have learnt in the past. Personally, working on the project allows me to take on the challenge of investigating melancholic literature, which has always been on my mind since my second year of study. It also prompts me to go beyond what I have been doing in the past and to take a more macro perspective when doing literary analysis, which subsequently enables me to further explore and embrace my identity as an English major.