Modernism and melancholia share intellectual fate: being at once categories, conditions, discourses, modes of expression, and social projects, they feed on their own ambiguity. But modernism and melancholia also share a history: it was in the cultural-historical period we tentatively term 'modernism' that a fundamental shift in our understanding of melancholia occurred. This study addresses these questions by focusing on the manifestations of melancholia in modernist fiction internationally.