The Routledge History of Loneliness takes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of a modern emotion, exploring its form and development across cultures from the seventeenth century to the present.
Bringing together thirty scholars from various disciplines, including history, anthropology, philosophy, literature and art history, the volume considers how loneliness was represented in art and literature, conceptualised by philosophers and writers and described by people in their personal narratives. It considers loneliness as a feeling so often defined in contrast to sociability and affective connections, particularly attending to loneliness in relation to the family, household and community. Acknowledging that loneliness is a relatively novel term in English, the book explores its precedents in ideas about solitude, melancholy and nostalgia, as well as how it might be considered in cross-cultural perspectives.
With wide appeal to students and researchers in a variety of subjects, including the history of emotions, social sciences and literature, this volume brings a critical historical perspective to an emotion with contemporary significance.
Author(s): Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus, Deborah Simonton
Series: Routledge Histories
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 511
City: London
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
A History of Loneliness: An Introduction
Part 1 Representing Loneliness
1 The Origins of ‘Loneliness’, the Oxford English Dictionary and Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590)
2 Polite Loneliness: The Problem Sociability of Spinsters in the Long Eighteenth Century
3 Gender and Loneliness in Business: A Milliner and Her Agent in Eighteenth-Century Southern Europe
4 ‘My Solitary and Retired Life’: Queen Charlotte’s Solitude(s)
5 ‘I Feel as if Part of [My] Self Was Torn From Me’: Entrepreneurship, Absence and Loneliness in Nineteenth-Century England
6 David Hume and the Disease of the Learned: Melancholy, Loneliness and Philosophy
7 Falling In and Out of Place: The Errant Status of Solitude in Early Modern Europe
8 ‘Here in My Loneliness, I Suffer’: Illness, Isolation and Loneliness in the Diaries of Kirsti Teräsvuori (1899–1988)
9 Time, Space and Loneliness in Bengali and Marathi Poetry
10 In Solitary Pursuit: Loneliness and the Quest for Love in Modern Britain
11 Loneliness as Crisis in Britain after 1950: Temporality, Modernity and the Historical Gaze
Part 2 Household and Communities
12 Loneliness and Food in Early Modern England
13 ‘Disengagement From All Creatures’: Exploring Loneliness in Early Modern English Cloisters
14 Ageing and Loneliness in England, 1500–1800
15 Loneliness, Love and the Longing for Health: Mary Graham’s Consumption
16 Loneliness and Contested Communities in Mary Prince’s Slave Narrative, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831)
17 Solitude in Early Nineteenth-Century German-Speaking Europe
18 ‘As an Only Child I Must Have Been Lonely Though I Was Not Aware of It at the Time’: Only Children’s Reflections on the Experience of Loneliness in Britain, 1850–1950
19 Lonely in a Crowd: The Transformative Effect of School Culture in Schoolgirl and College Fiction
20 ‘A Purer Form of Loneliness’: Loneliness and the Search for Community Among Gay and Bisexual Men in Scotland, 1940–1980
21 Loneliness as Social Critique: Disregard and the Limits of Care in 21st-Century Japan
Part 3 Distance, Place and Displacement
22 Loneliness and Sociability in Maritime and Colonial Space: A Comparative Intersectional Analysis of the Journals of Lt Ralph Clark and Dr Joseph Arnold
23 The Loneliness of Leadership: Royal Naval Officers in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
24 ‘Small Uneasinesses and Petty Fears’: Life Cycle, Masculinity and Loneliness
25 Lonely Places in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Scottish Balladry
26 Navigating ‘Loneliness’ in the Reformed Lunatic Asylum: Britain, 1800–1860
27 ‘There Is a Trace of You in the Air of That Room’: Practices of Coping With Separation From Friends in Late-Nineteenth-Century Finland
28 ‘One of My Own Kind’: Jessie Currie’s Experience of Loneliness in British Central Africa, 1891–1894
29 Loneliness, the Love Letter and the Performance of Romance During Wartime Separation, 1939–1945
30 Voices From Lost Homelands: Loss, Longing and Loneliness
31 ‘We Are Still Alive’: Refugees and Loneliness
Index
