"Breitwieser has been working for almost two decades on the psycho-political tangle of representing loss, to which he brings an especially philosophical focal length and evocative way with language. National Melancholy is, above all things, a book meant to be read , not just an argument to be summarized and circulated." —Thomas Ferraro, Duke University "According to National Melancholy, American writers believe in what Michael Breitweiser concisely identifies as the "not-yet" rather than the "no-more." American literature is committed, that is, to imagining the nation as a state of "permanent futurity". Despite this devotion to the "not-yet," however, the "no-more," as Breitweiser's highly impressive and extraordinarily wide-ranging collection of essays amply demonstrates, is not so easily left behind." - Novel "National Melancholy is among the most important books on American literature of the last decade. Breitwieser makes an astonishing case that a thwarted mourning process has been a precipitant phenomenon in the production of a large number of classic American texts. The book itself constitutes a successful act of mourning through the discovery of a language with which to confess, unburden, and move forward." - Jay Fleigelman (Stanford University)