Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction

ISBN-13: 9780312239473 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 223 str.

Edward Engelberg

Opis

In this study of solitude in modernist fiction, Edward Engelberg explores the ways in which solitude functions thematically to shape meaning in literary works, and how solitude as a condition has contributed to the making of a topos. Selected novels are analyzed to highlight the ambiguities that solitude brings to their meanings. The freedom that solitude bestows also becomes a burden from which the protagonists seek release. Although such ambiguities about solitude have existed from the Bible and the Ancients through the centuries following, they alter their shape within the context of time. The story of solitude in the 20th century moves from the Self's removal from society and retreat into nature to a condition external to Society, where the Self confronts itself, with uncertain consequences. A chapter is devoted to a synoptic analysis of solitude in the West, with emphasis on the Renaissance to the 20th century, and another chapter analyzes the ambiguities of solitude that set the stage for modernism: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; selected works by Woolf, Mann, Sartre, Camus, and Beckett illuminate particular modernist issues of solitude and how their authors sought to resolve them.

Recenzje

'Engleberg's argument is so clearly made and persuasive that one must ask...why no one has made and developed this point before.' - Choice

Spis treści

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

O autorze

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.