Binding: Paperback
Description: A compassionate wide - ranging study. Terry Eagleton The Guardian Despite 21st - century fears of a modern 'epidemic of loneliness its history has been sorely neglected. A Biography of Loneliness is the first history of its kind to be published in English offering a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries philosophical tracts political discussions and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical universal phenomenon. It is in fact a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist. As Alberti shows the birth of loneliness is linked to the development of modernity: the all - encompassing ideology of the individual that has emerged in the mind and physical sciences in economic structures in philosophy and politics. While it has a biography of its own loneliness impacts on people differently according to their gender ethnicity religion outlook and socio - economic position. It is Alberti argues not a single state but an 'emotion cluster' composed of a wide variety of responses that include fear anger resentment and sorrow. In spite of this loneliness is not always negative. And it is physical as well as psychological: loneliness is a product of the body as much as the mind. Looking at informative case studies such as Sylvia Plath Queen Victoria and Virginia Woolf A Biography of Loneliness charts the emergence of loneliness as a modern emotional state. From social media addiction to widowhood from homelessness to the oldest old from mall hauls to massages loneliness appears in all aspects of 21st - century life. Yet we cannot address its meanings let alone formulate a cure without attention to its complex protean history.
Title: A Biography Of Loneliness The History Of An Emotion
Author(s): Bound Alberti Fay (Honorary Senior Research Fellow Queen Mary University Of London)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780198811350
Pages: 320 Pages, Black And White Images
Publication Date: 3/14/2021
Category: The Self, Ego, Identity, Personality