Critical Reception
Admirers of The Anatomy of Melancholy range from Samuel Johnson, Holbrook Jackson (whose Bibliomania was based on the style and presentation), George Armstrong Custer, Charles Lamb, and John Keats (who said it was his favourite book), to Stanley Fish, Philip Pullman, Jorge Luis Borges (who used a quote as an epigraph to his story "The Library of Babel"), Nick Cave, Samuel Beckett, and Jacques Barzun (who sees in it many anticipations of 20th century psychiatry). According to The Guardian literary critic Nick Lezard, the Anatomy "survives among the cognoscenti".
Burton's solemn tone and his endeavour to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations were ridiculed by Lawrence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Sterne also mocked Burton's quaint and old-fashioned divisions in the ludicrous titles of his chapters, and parodied his grave and sober account of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia.
Read more about this topic: The Anatomy Of Melancholy
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“It would be easy ... to regard the whole of world 3 as timeless, as Plato suggested of his world of Forms or Ideas.... I propose a different view—one which, I have found, is surprisingly fruitful. I regard world 3 as being essentially the product of the human mind.... More precisely, I regard the world 3 of problems, theories, and critical arguments as one of the results of the evolution of human language, and as acting back on this evolution.”
—Karl Popper (1902–1994)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)