Written as an advocacy of melancholy s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the Eighteenth Century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness.

The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive...