A Biography Of Loneliness

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. Usingletters 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, itslanguage 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 onpeople 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 notalways 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.

Despite 21st-century fears of an 'epidemic' of loneliness, its history has been sorely neglected. A Biography of Loneliness offers 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. And where loneliness is identified, it is not always bad, but a complex emotional state that differs according to class, gender, ethnicity and experience. 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 and embodied emotional state.

'Gripping, harrowing and extremely moving... A painfully page-turning read...' - The Sunday Times Clonliffe Seminary, 1972. Odran Yates arrives after his mother informs him that he has a vocation to the priesthood. He is full of ambition and hope, dedicated to his studies and keen to make friends. Forty years later, Odran’s devotion has been challenged by the revelations that have shattered the Irish people’s faith in the Church. And when a family tragedy opens wounds from his past, he is forced to confront the demons that have raged within a once-respected institution, and recognize his own complicity in their propagation. From the award-winning author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies, comes this courageous and intensely personal tale.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism #1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring. When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks to Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, from Henry Darger’s hoarding to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed. Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

A brave and revealing examination of an overlooked affliction that affects one in four Canadians. Despite having a demanding job, good friends, and a supportive family, Emily White spent many of her nights and weekends alone at home, trying to understand why she felt so disconnected from everyone. To keep up the façade of an active social life and hide the painful truth, that she was suffering from severe loneliness, the successful young lawyer often lied to those around her — and to herself. In this insightful, soul-baring, and illuminating memoir, White chronicles her battle to understand and overcome this debilitating condition, and contends that chronic loneliness deserves the same attention as other mental difficulties, such as depression. "Right now, loneliness is something few people are willing to admit to," she writes. "There's no need for this silence, no need for the shame and self-blame it creates." By investigating the science of loneliness, challenging its stigma, encouraging other lonely people to talk about their struggles, and defining one person's experience, Lonely redefines how we look at loneliness and helps those afflicted see and understand their mood in an entirely new light, ultimately providing solace and hope. It is a moving, compassionate, and important book about a topic that is affecting more among us each day.

Essay from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: keine, University of Innsbruck, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This is a proseminary work for a literature course and it is about The History of Love. The contemporary American novel is written by Nicole Krauss and was published in 2005. By now it has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. (Krauss back cover) The paper will start with the biography of the author and her connection to the novel and to its content. The next and main chapters will then deal with the novel itself, which takes place in New York in the time after the 2nd world war and which is told through various stories, perspectives and characters. The paper’s focus will lie on two very important and story-defining themes: Loneliness and Love. The main question of this paper will be in which way Loneliness and Love belong together and how this inextricable connection is portrayed in the book. This will further be pointed out through the relationship and personality of chosen characters (Alma and Leo Gursky). To make it more understandable a short plot and character overview will be given at the beginning of the paper. The paper will be ended by a conclusion, which sums up all results of my research and analysis and which gives answers to the main question of this paper.

ABOUT THE BOOK Even in the days when he was Davie (or Davy) Jones of the the Kon-Rads, King Bees or the Manish Boys (a few of his early bands) — David Bowie was, and still is, a fully formed, timeless pop artist. Although he always experimented and changed stylistically, he seems to have simply burst into this world as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, David Bowie, and finally just Mr. Jones — all rolled into one. He is a shimmering chimera changing to reflect what we hope to find, and what we don’t expect to find: the romantic troubadour, the glammed outer space messiah, the burnt-out case from another world, the sophisticated, world-weary philosopher, the aging artist facing his own mortality. David Bowie’s best known, and most groundbreaking character is Ziggy Stardust. If the trappings of Ziggy Stardust, glam-androgyn, are stripped away, what we have left is simply great pop music. The gender-smashing concept of Ziggy — as stimulating, and some would say, as freeing for society as it was — isn’t a bolt out of the blue for us today as it was then. What survives is the music. So the sociological effect of David Bowie’s depiction of gender with his character Ziggy Stardust isn’t his most valuable contribution to pop music. The music is. Besides his popular success, part of why David Bowie is such a great contributor to late 20th century rock and roll is that the answer to who or what David Bowie is is a reflection of who we are. Like all great artists he shows us aspects of our own imaginations. And in an uncanny way, he has always managed to presage certain trends or events at a time when Western pop culture was changing in a way that in hindsight seems inevitable. At any given time, the shape of the future is unknown. An obvious observation, but one that needs restating in order to place ourselves more fully in the shoes of those who came before us. In 2004, Rolling Stone put David Bowie at number 39 on its “100 Greatest Artists of All Time ” list. His friend and sometime collaborator, Lou Reed, commented that ”he has a melodic sense that is just way above anyone else in rock and roll.” Listen to just a few of his songs, and it becomes obvious that he is a great songwriter as well as a great performer: “Space Oddity”, “Changes”, “Ziggy Stardust”, “Life on Mars?”, “Young Americans”, “Fame”, ”Sound and Vision”, “Heroes”, “Let’s Dance”. His music varies so much over the years — from the English music hall style of some of the songs on the 1967 album, David Bowie, to the American soul style of Young Americans, to the euro-rock, post punk sounds of the Berlin Trilogy, Heroes, Low, and Lodger, to mainstream hits of the 80s, ”Let’s Dance” and ”Modern Love”, to his late career, jazz-influenced song “Bring Me the Disco King”. Despite the fact that he has varied his approach stylistically, Bowie explains his approach to his subject matter in this YouTube video of a Danish interview given at the start of his A Reality Tour of 2003. He has returned to the same themes throughout his life: “loneliness, isolation, abandonment, spirituality, and the lack thereof.” He tells the interviewer that he is fundamentally the same person that he was a teenager, except that he is three and a half inches taller. According to Bowie, he has shifted his perspective, but not his artistic preoccupations... ...buy the book to read more!