Cultures Of Solitude ; Loneliness – Limitation – Liberation

Description

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. Cover......Page 1 Table of Contents......Page 7 Acknowledgments (Ina Bergmann / Stefan Hippler)......Page 11 I Solitude and American Studies......Page 13 Cultures of Solitude: Reflections on Loneliness, Limitation, and Liberation in the US (Ina Bergmann)......Page 15 II Early Solitude: Language, Body, and Gender......Page 45 “Alone, Without a Guide”: Solitude as a Literary and Cultural Paradox (Svend Erik Larsen)......Page 47 The Enigmatic and the Ecological: American Late Enlightenment Hermits and the Pursuit of, in Addition to Happiness, Permanence (Kevin L. Cope)......Page 63 “The Luxury of Solitude”: Conduct, Domestic Deliberation, and the Eighteenth-Century Female Recluse (Coby Dowdell) ......Page 81 III Solitude in the Nineteenth Century: Gender, Politics, and Poetics......Page 101 “Away to Solitude, to Freedom, to Desolation!”: Hermits and Recluses in Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (Ina Bergmann)......Page 103 Thoreau and the Landscapes of Solitude: Painted Epiphanies in Undomesticated Nature (Margaretta M. Lovell)......Page 125 “The World to Each Other”: The Joint Politics of Isolation and Reform among Garrisonian Abolitionists (Hélène Quanquin)......Page 141 IV Solitude from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century: Society, Spirituality, and Religion......Page 155 Three Types of Deep Solitude: Religious Quests, Aesthetic Retreats, and Withdrawals due to Personal Distress (Ira J. Cohen)......Page 157 American Lonesome: Our Native Sense of Otherness (Kevin Lewis)......Page 171 V Solitude in the Twentieth Century: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity......Page 187 “Mind Is the Cabin”: Substance and Success in Post-Thoreauvian Second Homes (Randall Roorda)......Page 189 Socially Constructed Selfhood: Emily Dickinson in Full-Cast and Single-Actor Plays (Nassim Winnie Balestrini)......Page 205 Changing Cultures of Solitude: Reclusiveness in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (Jochen Achilles)......Page 219 VI Solitude from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century: Space, Identity, and Pathology......Page 231 “It’s What We Have in Common, This Aloneness”: Solitude, Communality, and the Self in the Writing of David Foster Wallace (Clare Hayes-Brady) ......Page 233 Alone in the Crowd: Urban Recluses in US-American Film (Rüdiger Heinze) ......Page 247 VII Solitude Today: Technology, Community, and Identity......Page 259 Solitude in the Digital Age: Privacy, Aloneness, and Withdrawal in Dave Eggers’s The Circle (Stefan Hippler) ......Page 261 Going Away to the Wilderness for Solitude … and Community: Ecoambiguity, the Engaged Pastoral, and the ‘Semester in the Wild’ Experience (Scott Slovic) ......Page 277 Should We Be Left Alone? Psychological Perspectives on the Implications of Seeking Solitude (Robert J. Coplan and Julie C. Bowker) ......Page 289 Contributors......Page 305 Index......Page 307