Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction

Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction PDF Author: E. Engelberg
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137105984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In this study of solitude in high modernist writing, Edward Engelberg explores the ways in which solitude functions thematically to shape meaning in literary works, as well as what solitude as a condition has contributed to the making of a trope. Selected novels are analyzed for the ambiguities that solitude injects into their meanings. The freedom of solitude also becomes a burden from which the protagonists seek liberation. Although such ambiguities about solitude exist from the Bible and the Ancients through the centuries following, they change within the context of time. The story of solitude in the twentieth century moves from the self's removal from society and retreat into nature to an extra-social position within which the self confronts itself. A chapter is devoted to the synoptic analysis of solitude in the West, with emphasis on the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and another chapter analyzes the ambiguities that set the stage for modernism: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Selected works by Woolf, Mann, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett highlight particular modernist issues of solitude and how their authors sought to resolve them.

Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction

Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction PDF Author: E. Engelberg
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137105984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In this study of solitude in high modernist writing, Edward Engelberg explores the ways in which solitude functions thematically to shape meaning in literary works, as well as what solitude as a condition has contributed to the making of a trope. Selected novels are analyzed for the ambiguities that solitude injects into their meanings. The freedom of solitude also becomes a burden from which the protagonists seek liberation. Although such ambiguities about solitude exist from the Bible and the Ancients through the centuries following, they change within the context of time. The story of solitude in the twentieth century moves from the self's removal from society and retreat into nature to an extra-social position within which the self confronts itself. A chapter is devoted to the synoptic analysis of solitude in the West, with emphasis on the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and another chapter analyzes the ambiguities that set the stage for modernism: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Selected works by Woolf, Mann, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett highlight particular modernist issues of solitude and how their authors sought to resolve them.

The Art, Literature and Music of Solitude

The Art, Literature and Music of Solitude PDF Author: Julian Stern
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350348031
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book presents a thematic analysis of various aspects of solitude, silence and loneliness, from the ancient world to the present day, explored thematically with consideration to the links between aloneness to other social and political issues. The themes include exile (expulsion from a community), ecstasy (getting 'out of oneself') and enstasy (being comfortable within oneself), to the Romantic idea of the artist as solitary. There is work on aloneness in and through nature, especially the importance of natural settings for positive experiences of solitude. A central theme is alienation and its emotions, with the idea of loneliness and the rejected self being a more modern experience. The book explores modernism and postmodernism as presenting new forms of solitude in the twentieth century, and how, more recently, there have been attempts to 'recover' the self, through therapeutic uses of the arts. All of these types and experiences of aloneness are described through the lenses of artistic, literary and musical forms of expression, as aloneness is not only explored and articulated through these art forms, but is in many ways created through these art forms.

Modernizing Solitude

Modernizing Solitude PDF Author: Yoshiaki Furui
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320067
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
An innovative and timely examination of the concept of solitude in nineteenth-century American literature During the nineteenth century, the United States saw radical developments in media and communication that reshaped concepts of spatiality and temporality. As the telegraph, the postal system, and public transportation became commonplace, the country achieved a level of connectedness that was never possible before. At this level, physical isolation no longer equaled psychological separation from the exterior world, and as communication networks proliferated, being disconnected took on negative cultural connotations. Though solitude, and the lack thereof, is a pressing concern in today’s culture of omnipresent digital connectivity, Yoshiaki Furui shows that solitude has been a significant preoccupation since the nineteenth century. The obsession over solitude is evidenced by many writers of the period, with consequences for many basic notions of creativity, art, and personal and spiritual fulfillment. In Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Furui examines, among other works, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters, and telegraphic literature in the 1870s to identify the virtues and values these writers bestowed upon solitude in a time and place where it was being consistently threatened or devalued. Although each writer has a unique way of addressing the theme, they all aim to reclaim solitude as a positive, productive state of being that is essential to the writing process and personal identity. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach to understand modern solitude and the resulting literature, Furui seeks to historicize solitude by anchoring literary works in this revolutionary yet interim period of American communication history, while also applying theoretical insights into the literary analysis.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Solitude, Silence and Loneliness

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Solitude, Silence and Loneliness PDF Author: Julian Stern
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350162159
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Solitude, Silence and Loneliness is the first major account integrating research on solitude, silence and loneliness from across academic disciplines and across the lifespan. The editors explore how being alone – in its different forms, positive and negative, as solitude, silence and loneliness – is learned and developed, and how it is experienced in childhood and youth, adulthood and old age. Philosophical, psychological, historical, cultural and religious issues are addressed by distinguished scholars from Europe, North and Latin America, and Asia.

Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature

Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature PDF Author: Joseph Acquisto
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611494079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures by Joseph Acquisto examines the representation of Robinson Crusoe and other castaways in both popular and serious French literature for both children and adults from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It examines not only novels but lyric poetry, providing not just a literary history but interpretation of a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors.

Ritual Unbound

Ritual Unbound PDF Author: Thomas Cousineau
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138511
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This study explores the vestiges of primitive sacrificial rituals that emerge in a group of canonical modernist novels, including The Turn of the Screw, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby, and To the Lighthouse. It argues that these novels reenact a process that achieved its seminal expression in the Genesis story of The Binding of Isaac, in which Abraham, having been prevented from sacrificing Isaac, offers up a ram in his place. Modernist reenactments of this pattern present narrators who, although vigorously protesting the victimization of certain characters, unfailingly seize upon others as their surrogates. Each novel is designed in such a way, however, as to resist the reconstruction of a sacrificial ritual to which its narrator is prone. The resulting tension between the binding and unbinding of ritual persecution dramatizes the paradox that we can neither believe convincingly in the guilt of our scapegoats nor imagine a society that has dispensed with them entirely. Thomas Cousineau is Professor of English at Washington College in Maryland.

Is The Self Dissolved?

Is The Self Dissolved? PDF Author: Dr. Vandana Pathak
Publisher: Blue Rose Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Dr. Vandana Pathak invites you to explore the very essence of who we are in the modern world. "Is the Self Dissolved?", is her doctoral thesis and tackles a thought-provoking question: whether our sense of self has fundamentally changed? When we read books of Victorian times, we saw a linearity in characters, there was sense and a clear trajectory, like Pip's love for Estella. But in the Modern age, there is a lack of this centrality of the Self. Let apart loving others, finding meaning in social institutions, we rarely know and love ourselves. Hence, Meursault, Josef K and Roquentin are not just characters in iconic philosophical novels, but rather pieces of the modern, scattered humans who do not feel as whole, as root, or as centered as previous generations. The modern Self seems in constant flux, matching the external problem with an internal dissolution. In this light, this book uses history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to understand this dissolution of self. This is made particularly poignant in light of recent global turmoil, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, and conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine. Through this book, Dr. Vandana also urges readers to navigate these uncertain times with introspection of the Self and universal empathy.

Comparative Criticism: Volume 24, Fantastic Currencies in Comparative Literature: Gothic to Postmodern

Comparative Criticism: Volume 24, Fantastic Currencies in Comparative Literature: Gothic to Postmodern PDF Author: E. S. Shaffer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521818698
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This new volume looks at Fantastic Currencies: money, modes, media.

Global Crusoe

Global Crusoe PDF Author: Ann Marie Fallon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317127994
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Global Crusoe travels across the twentieth-century globe, from a Native American reservation to a Botswanan village, to explore the huge variety of contemporary incarnations of Daniel Defoe's intrepid character. In her study of the novels, poems, short stories and films that adapt the Crusoe myth, Ann Marie Fallon argues that the twentieth-century Crusoe is not a lone, struggling survivor, but a cosmopolitan figure who serves as a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression. Fallon uses feminist and postcolonial theory to reexamine Defoe's original novel and several contemporary texts, showing how writers take up the traumatic narratives of Crusoe in response to the intensifying transnational and postcolonial experiences of the second half of the twentieth century. Reading texts by authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.M. Coetzee within their social, historical and political contexts, Fallon shows how contemporary revisions of the novel reveal the tensions inherent in the transnational project as people and ideas move across borders with frequency, if not necessarily with ease. In the novel Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe's discovery of 'Friday's footprint' fills him with such anxiety that he feels the print like an animal and burrows into his shelter. Likewise, modern readers and writers continue to experience a deep anxiety when confronting the narrative issues at the center of Crusoe's story.

Choice

Choice PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic libraries
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description