Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; Palgrave
Published: July 13, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780312239473
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; Political Science; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Politics/International Relations; General; Literary Criticism & Collections / General; International Relations - General; 20th century; Fiction; History and criticism; Modernism (Literature); Solitude in literature
First sentence: Much has been said about the "existential crisis" so dominant in the isolates of modernist fiction, but far less has been said about the ambiguities that attend the solitary's choice, from the start.
Description: "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 since the time of the Bible and the ancients, they alter their shape 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 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 twentieth 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."--BOOK JACKET.