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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.
List of contents
Introduction Self Against Self: Toward Ambiguous Solitude in Modernist Fiction Robinson Crusoe : Discourse With Oneself and the Solitude of Place 'Soliloquy in Solitude': To the Lighthouse O Altitudo! O Solitudo! Exilic Solitude and the Ambiguous Ethics in The Magic Mountain Solitude of Questionable Freedom in Cartesian Antagonists: Sartre and Camus As They Lay Dying 'Rotting With Solitude': Endgame in Beckett's Trilogy Conclusion
About the author
EDWARD ENGELBERG is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. Aside from numerous essays and reviews, he is the author of The Vast Design: Patterns in W. B. Yeats's Aesthethic (1964; revised second edition, 1988); The Symbolist Poem: The Development of the English Tradition (editor); The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience, Goethe to Camus; and Elegiac Fictions: The Motif of the Unlived Life.
Summary
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.
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'Engleberg's argument is so clearly made and persuasive that one must ask...why no one has made and developed this point before.' - Choice
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'Engleberg's argument is so clearly made and persuasive that one must ask...why no one has made and developed this point before.' - Choice
