Short description:

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.

Long description:

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.

Chapter [

"Loneliness is one of the most intriguing and relatively recent additions to the study of the history of emotion, with ramifications both past and present. This ambitious collection significantly advances the subject, by examining intellectual, social and geographical contexts with a number of imaginative chapters, from the early modern period until recent times. The result captures important current findings while encouraging further analysis, including comparative work?just what a compendium of this sort should do."

Peter N. Stearns, George Mason Univesity, US

Table of Contents:

History of Loneliness: 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 & 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  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: Households, Families and Communities  12. Loneliness and Food in Early Modern England  13. ?Disengagement from all Creaturs?: Exploring Loneliness in Early Modern English Cloisters  14. Ageing and Loneliness in England, c.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, c. 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 amongst Gay and Bisexual Men in Scotland, 1940?1980  21. Loneliness as Social Critique: Disregard and the Limits of Care in Twenty-First 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 & 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, c.1800?1860  27. ?There is a trace of you in the air of that room? ? Practices of Coping with Separation from a Friend 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