Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction

  • Book
  • © 2001

Overview

Authors:
  1. Edward Engelberg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Preface

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 1-5

  3. Introduction

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 7-19

  4. Self Against Self: Toward Ambiguous Solitude in Modernist Fiction

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 21-48

  5. Discourse With Oneself and The Solitude of Place: Robinson Crusoe

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 49-73

  6. “Soliloquy in Solitude”: To The Lighthouse

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 75-95

  7. O Altitudo! O Solitudo! Exilic Solitude and Ambiguous Ethics on The Magic Mountain

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 97-116

  8. Solitude of Questionable Freedom in Cartesian Antagonists: Sartre and Camus

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 117-139

  9. As They Lay Dying “Rotting with Solitude”: Endgame in Beckett’s Trilogy

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 141-161

  10. Conclusion

    • Edward Engelberg
    Pages 163-173

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 175-223
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

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

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.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation