| Description |
1 electronic resource (330 pages) |
| Contents |
Solitude and American studies. Ina Bergmann: Cultures of solitude: reflections on loneliness, limitation, and liberation in the USA -- Early solitude: language, body, and gender. Svend Erik Larsen: Alone, without a guide: solitude as a literary and cultural paradox -- Kevin leaves Cope: The enigmatic and the ecological: American late enlightenment hermits and the pursuit of, in addition to happiness, permanence -- Coby Dowdell: The luxury of solitude: conduct, domestic deliberation, and the eighteenth-century female recluse -- Solitude in the nineteenth century: gender, politics, and poetics. Ina Bergmann: Away to solitude, to freedom, to desolation: hermits and recluses in Julia Ward Howe's The hermaphrodite -- Margaretta M. Lovell: Thoreau and the landscapes of solitude: painted epiphanies in undomesticated nature -- Hélène Quanquin: T¿â¿¿the world to each other: the joint politics of isolation and reform among Garrisonian abolitionists -- Solitude from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: society, spirituality, and religion. Ira J. Cohen: Three types of deep solitude: religious quests, aesthetic retreats, and withdrawals due to personal distress -- Kevin Lewis: American lonesome: our native sense of otherness -- Solitude in the twentieth century: space, gender, and ethnicity. Randall Roorda: A mind is the cabin: substance and success in post-Thoreauvian second homes -- Nassim Winnie Balestrini: Socially constructed selfhood: Emily Dickinson in full-cast and single-actor plays -- Jochen Achilles: Changing cultures of solitude: reclusiveness in Sandra Cisneros's The house on Mango Street -- Solitude from the twentieth to the twenty-first century: space, identity, and pathology. Clare Hayes-Brady: It's what we have in common, this aloneness: solitude, communality, and the self in the writing of David Foster Wallace -- Rüdiger Heinze: Alone in the crowd: urban recluses in US-American film -- Solitude today: technology, community, and identity. Stefan Hippler: Solitude in the digital age: privacy, aloneness, and withdrawal in Dave Eggers' The circle -- Scott Slovic: Going away to the wilderness for solitude . . . and community: ecoambiguity, the engaged pastoral, and the semester in the wild experience -- Robert J. Coplan and Julie C. Bowker: Should we be left alone? psychological perspectives on the implications of seeking solitude |
| Summary |
This collection of essays comprises cultural analyses of practices of eremitism and reclusiveness in the USA, which are inseparably linked to the American ideals of individualism and freedom. Covering a time frame from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the essays study cultural products such as novels, poems, plays, songs, paintings, television shows, films, and social media, which represent the costs and benefits of deliberate withdrawal and involuntary isolation from society. Thus, this book offers valuable contributions to contemporary cultural discourses on privacy, surveillance, new technology, pathology, anti-consumerism, simplification, and environmentalism. Solitaries can be read as trailblazers for an alternative future or as symptoms of a pathological society |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based on print version record; resource not viewed |
| Subject |
American literature -- History and criticism
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Solitude in literature
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Solitude in popular culture -- United States
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American literature
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Solitude in literature
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Solitude in popular culture
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United States
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| Author |
Bergmann, Ina editor
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Hippler, Stefan, 1960- editor
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| LC no. |
2020719458 |
| ISBN |
9783631708156 |
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3631708157 |
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9783631708163 |
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3631708165 |
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9783653071054 |
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3653071054 |
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