Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion

Fay Bound Alberti

3.5/5 ( ratings)

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.

Pages: 320

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Release: September 12, 2019

ISBN: 0198811349

ISBN 13: 9780198811343

A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion

Fay Bound Alberti

3.5/5 ( ratings)

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.

Pages: 320

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Release: September 12, 2019

ISBN: 0198811349

ISBN 13: 9780198811343

More books from Fay Bound Alberti

This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture

Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700-1950

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Germs and Governance: The Past, Present and Future of Hospital Infection, Prevention and Control

4.3/5 ( ratings)

A Biography of Loneliness Lib/E: The History of an Emotion

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?