Cultures of Solitude
Loneliness – Limitation – Liberation
Edited By Ina Bergmann and Stefan Hippler
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.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Ina Bergmann and Stefan Hippler
I Solitude and American Studies
Cultures of Solitude: Reflections on Loneliness, Limitation, and Liberation in the US
II Early Solitude: Language, Body, and Gender
“Alone, Without a Guide”: Solitude as a Literary and Cultural Paradox
“The Luxury of Solitude”: Conduct, Domestic Deliberation, and the Eighteenth-Century Female Recluse
III Solitude in the Nineteenth Century: Gender, Politics, and Poetics
Thoreau and the Landscapes of Solitude: Painted Epiphanies in Undomesticated Nature
IV Solitude from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century: Society, Spirituality, and Religion
American Lonesome: Our Native Sense of Otherness
V Solitude in the Twentieth Century: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity
“Mind Is the Cabin”: Substance and Success in Post-Thoreauvian Second Homes
Socially Constructed Selfhood: Emily Dickinson in Full-Cast and Single-Actor Plays
Changing Cultures of Solitude: Reclusiveness in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street
VI Solitude from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century: Space, Identity, and Pathology
Alone in the Crowd: Urban Recluses in US-American Film
VII Solitude Today: Technology, Community, and Identity
Solitude in the Digital Age: Privacy, Aloneness, and Withdrawal in Dave Eggers’s The Circle
Robert J. Coplan and Julie C. Bowker
Should We Be Left Alone? Psychological Perspectives on the Implications of Seeking Solitude