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One of the most fascinating representatives of the Romanian exile, even though he is less famous when compared to his great contemporaries Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco or E.M. Cioran, Vintilă Horia represents an interesting example of artistic capacity to empathize with the protagonists of his own work. All his great novels (The Knight of Resignation, A Tomb in the Sky or God Was Born in Exile) include the recurrent image of tragic exiles unexpectedly confronted with the harsh reality of uprooting and forced to come to terms with the new world they reach, sometimes after a challenging or dangerous journey. The Latin poet Ovid in God Was Born in Exile (Dieu est né en exil, 1960) is perhaps Horia’s most remarkable character, the protagonist’s exile to Tomis representing an expression of the author’s own painful exile after World War II, when he was forced to leave Romania for good. Ovid’s exile and then his journeys stand for a complex process of initiation, completed only when the poet also has the revelation of his future possible symbolic rebirth and foresees his way to spiritual redemption. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary French novelists Michel Houellebecq and Yannick Haenel may seem to have little in common, but in fact both are given to making pronouncements about the state of Western civilization, and each has been described as prophetic in this regard. Houellebecq's Sérotonine (2019) and Haenel's Tiens ferme ta couronne (2017) are both stories whose protagonists isolate in their apartments, and—from that remove—proceed to, ostensibly, see the world for what it really is. Looming in both novels is a twenty-four-hour-news-cycle culture that serves as the ultimate prophet of doom. Haenel's hero finds in solitude the critical distance from that culture needed to formulate an alternative vision of the world and exorcise the horror just enough to find hope. In Houellebecq's novel, that distance is impossible, as his hero, a self-proclaimed "telemancer," remains obsessed with cable news and as, on a deeper level, Houellebecq's style merges seamlessly with the news cycle's fearmongering logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on British author Marion Milner's views on holidays in her writings, such as in the book "Eternity's Sunrise: A Way of Keeping a Diary." Milner considers holidays the way to see the world differently from the publicly agreed ways of seeing and considers the moments of solitude essential. She draws out the connections between private pleasures and political life and between eternity and history.

This article aims to explore Mary Hays's solitude and the crucial role it plays in her quest for self-fulfillment, as well as the social duties she concomitantly carried out with the fruits of her solitude. Drawing on Western discourse on solitude and on the accounts related to the same subject in Hays's correspondence, I investigate the motives behind Hays's self-imposed solitariness and further examine the practical solitude she implemented in the most productive period of her professional life. Unlike many male and contemporary elite female solitaries who cast a romantic veil over solitariness, Hays sought solitude for practical purposes. Moreover, Hays's solitude connects with British women's suffrage movement; the fruits of her solitude—a life of independence and a series of writings dedicated to gender equality—may have impacted her niece Matilda Mary Hays as well as contributed to women's enfranchisement in Britain. Finally, this article contends that Mary Hays's more realistic application of solitude not only served as the key to her self-fulfillment, but also proved to be instrumental in bringing about the enfranchisement of women in twentieth-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reading of Grazia Deledda's novel La chiesa della solitudine (1936) examines the discursive counter-practices which quietly resist the foundations of the patriarchal system through the observation of a woman's self-imposed solitude. 'e protagonist's resistance to societal diktats dismisses the labelling imposed upon Deledda's voice as 'conservative'. 'e symbolic value of this novel is ethically charged in its meditation on the virtues of solitude. With her choice, the protagonist Maria Concezione demonstrates that non-futurity is a value to defend against the societal structure that envisages marriage as the only existential outcome for a single woman of independent means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bieye 別業, or villa, was a type of building that struck a balance between sociability and seclusion. As such, one of the most important functions of bieye poetry was the mediation between humanity and nature. In the early Tang, this mediation was represented in the aesthetics of bieye poems, which contained both simple and ornate styles. In the high Tang, by contrast, the concept of spiritual purification became more valued, and as a result the ways of mediation between humanity and nature in bieye poetry frequently came to be associated with spiritual growth. In the high Tang, poets described the bieye as an ideal place where they could not only prepare to pursue an official position, but also live in seclusion. In these poems, the individuals residing in bieye were usually described as noble hermits. This mode of writing gradually replaced the early Tang stress on banquets or amusements, and it became the main focus of bieye poetry. In addition, some bieye poems that appear around the time of the An Lushan Rebellion broke away from the notion that all individuals in bieye were perfect, emphasizing instead the struggle between being an officeholder and a hermit. These different themes rendered the bieye poetry of the high Tang more diverse than that of the early Tang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Keats's visits to the Isle of Wight in 1817 and 1819 were key to his imaginative development. Eighteenth-century and Romantic-period travel literature reveal the island's importance as a picturesque destination rivalling the English Lakes. The medical endorsement of sea-bathing added to its popularity, while the sea itself had recently become an object of aesthetic appreciation. Keats's strong attachment to the sea is event in 'On the Sea' and Endymion, which he began on the island. Keats's letters chart his changing relationship to the solitude and beauty the Isle of Wight offered him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cătălin Dorian Florescu's novel Der Mann, der das Gluck Bringt (The Man Who Brings Happiness,), published in 2016, was translated in Romanian in 2018, as "Bărbatul care aduce fericirea". A writer who is defined by both Swiss and Romanian influences, Florescu infuses his novels with issues such as solitude, identity, or longing for happiness. Our article approaches some of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that Mary Shelley and E. M. Cioran have never been previously analyzed in the same context (they belong not only to different ages but also to divergent genres), we will find that they share at least two similar themes. The motif of solitude, common among Romantic poets (Coleridge, Byron, Poe), finds a deep expression in Shelley's Frankenstein and in Cioran's early oeuvre. A more thorough investigation of the British novelist and the Romanian-French self-described "anti-philosopher" discloses that hatred (a theme that is not frequently researched from a philosophical point of view) might be another of their obsessions. The concept of the nihilistic not-man becomes useful when we will follow the tripartite shape of hatred (of others, of myself and of God) not only in literature or philosophy but also in pop culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BothSo Long a LetterandYear of the Elephantwere written in the aftermath of the struggle for liberation from colonial rule, articulating the visibility of women in traditional, patriarchal African-Muslim contexts at a time when personal and socio-political exposés by women writers were quite uncommon. These first generation novellas, situated within the former French colonies Senegal and Morocco respectively, are articulations of agency which move both within and across borders and boundaries. Due to their personal circumstances, both narrators find themselves in a personal space where they are insiders as well as outsiders within their African-Muslim nations. Since they state that their commitment to their Islamic faith encompasses a critical interrogation of traditional and religious practices within their own societies, I will draw on the termdihliz, an Arabo-Persian term, (Moosa 2006:7) which suggests a liminal, threshold space. During their periods ofiddat,their seclusion enables the narrators to explore the prosaic and the sacred, the personal and the political from this space ofdihliz, and also promotes a sensitive perception of their historical and personal contexts from multiple perspectives, thereby re-positioning and re-constructing their identities as Muslim women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until the present millennium, very little creative literary writing in either English or Spanish had been published in the British colonial enclave of Gibraltar. In the course of the past decade, however, an expatriate Gibraltarian, M. G. [Mark Gerard] Sanchez, has produced a growing body of fiction and non-fiction aimed at constructing the foundations of a new literary tradition. The present article explores the connections between two significant aspects of his fiction: a located identity and the post/colonial gothic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Less than two months after moving from Philadelphia to New York, Poe, Virginia, and Maria Clemm moved in with the Brennan family in their farmhouse near present-day Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street, about five miles north of the densely populated portion of the city During this productive period of Poe’s career, he seems to have been more than usually obsessed with the perils of the magazine publishing world and his place in it. His letters and published writing reveal that he felt isolated, reflecting a frustration with his current situation while pointing the way toward the high-profile literary life he sought. “The Raven,” which he completed and published during this time, was the vehicle to greater renown; as an attention-grabbing tour de force about interior experience, it also mirrors the productive tension Poe found between the publishing hub of lower Manhattan and the seclusion of Brennan Farm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented in which Thomas Hardy's notion of relational solitude anticipates the concerns of D.W. Winnicott and other pyschoanalytic thinkers in the British object-relations tradition who are concerned with the ways a person one takes other people into the psyches and how the internal representations shape and structure people in his 1891 novel "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." It discusses the bidirectional exchange of ideas between the Victorian novel and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.

In the authors’ reading of Patrick McGrath's novella “Ground Zero”, the geopolitical consequences of 9/11 are not only shown to resonate in the protagonists’ domestic sphere, unsettling their comfortable vie intérieure, but they are also literally inscribed in the human mind. Focalized through a narrator active as a psychiatrist, McGrath's story invokes a quasi-unmediated subjectivity that seems unchallenged. As it turns out, however, the medical, moral and social authority upon which the nameless psychiatrist in “Ground Zero” acts, and the hierarchy of knowledge in her doctor–patient relationships are slowly being eroded from the inside out. The events of 9/11 have instigated in the characters’ social environment (and ultimately in themselves) a permanent factor of uncertainty and doubt. In reaction to this impingement on their daily routines, the narrator ensconces herself in a safe world of interiority and seclusion. Her highly tuned analytical skills notwithstanding, the narrator is at a loss when it comes to diagnosing the post-9/11 condition of the times, as well as her own position vis-à-vis the events. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses Caribbean women's writings on the concepts of space, territory, and confinement, focusing on the writing of Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat and the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Other topics include concepts of globality and being international, contextualized through social media such as Facebook and Twitter, spiritualism influenced by world events, and solitude/isolation.

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A literary criticism of the book "The Bay of Angels" by Anita Brookner is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the symbolic significance of these characters. It examines how the themes of trauma, despair and solitude were represented in the novel. An overview of the story is also given.

The article discusses the works of author Matthew Paris and Jorge Luis Borge and the maps of the Labyrinth. The author looks into Borge's novel "The Garden of Forking Paths" and Borge's message to Ts'ui Pên, a Chinese scholar who retreats into an unexpected seclusion, during which he plans to write a novel and construct a labyrinth. She examines the intersections between Borges' tale and Paris's "Chronica Majora." She mentions that both texts are separated by more than a millennium, and by language, genre, and intended audience, among other things.

A literary criticism of the book "Fire on the Mountain," by Anita Desai is presented. It seeks to examine the intertextuality in the novel and how the author incorporated textual references, allusions and echoes from other centers to drive home the sense of barrenness, alienation and seclusion. An overview of the story is also given.

The article discusses the books "Robinson Crusoe," "The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," and "Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe, with particular focus given to the themes of utopia, solitude, and geography. The author's assertion that Defoe intended the books as an allegory for his own solitary state is also touched on.

The article discusses the history and theoretical concerns of the work "Port Royal," by 19th century French writer and literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, with a focus on literary criticism and historiography and the themes of solitariness and solitude. Topics discussed include background on the work, Sainte-Beuve and his research on the history of the Port-Royal-des-Champs abbey of Cistercian nuns in Magny-les-Hameaux, outside Paris; and the impact of the abbey on French literary culture and history.

The article presents literary criticism of the book "Captain Singleton" by Daniel Defoe. It references the book "The Rise of the Novel" by Ian Watt. The author looks at the concept of Mitsein, or being-with, in Defoe's novel as related to the theories of philosopher Jacques Derrida. It is suggested that Defoe and Derrida carefully considered Mitsein as part of their explorations of solitude. Other topics include imperialism, isolation, friendship, and the depiction of women in Defoe's novel.

This article traces the development of Jorge Luis Borges's early love poetry, from the lyrical expression of the late 1910s to the bleak outlook of the early 1930s. Although Borges is not considered primarily a love poet, he did explore love and eroticism in his youthful verse. However, his treatment of the subject betrays an existential disenchantment that ended in failure and solitude. Together with his love poems, I aim to present an overview of Borges's views on sexuality and his idiosyncratic perception of the female figure later in his life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses hermits in eighteenth and nineteenth century American and British literature. It examines voluntary social seclusion from a political, philosophical, and theological perspective, comparing hermits' virtues, such as moderation, to those of U.S. President George Washington. Texts examined include the book "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe..." by English writer Daniel Defoe, the book "The Sweets of Solitude!...” by hermit Amos Wilson, and the article “Democracy,” by American writer John O’Sullivan, which appeared in the in the periodical "The United States Magazine and Democratic Review."

Much ink has been spilled over how Lu Xun's (1881-1936) political views inform his creative writing and how politics and literature are mutually implicated, but the aesthetics of his tragic narratives remains marginal in literary studies. Often lauded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun has not only made major contributions to the formation of literary realism but also put his unique vision of tragedy into practice. At the core of his tragic poems and narratives lie the tropes of solitude. The tragic is characterized, not by tragic incident, but by void thereof, by a state of speech-less solitude and nothingness ( xuwu). The aesthetic implications of such a tragic vision are twofold. The creation and consumption of literature in China during the first half of the twentieth century focused on questions of the nation and society, but Lu Xun's solitary characters in The Weeds ask fundamental existential questions while carving a space for a new genre of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matsuura Hisaki's novel Hantō[Peninsula] contains a highly saturated critical and poetic space, allowing us to probe the boundaries of Japan's periphery and the limits of the experience of interiority. An analysis of the structure and the narrative devices of the novel leads to the creation of a spatial model conceptualizing the idea of 'peninsula' as an existential and literary trope. The 'peninsula' is also a reversible notion combining the narrative of a private experience of seclusion with critical commitment for reconsidering modern Japan's cartography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between solitude in personal experience and historical research in biography. The role of personal psychology in historical writing is considered. The author reflects on the history of Western solitude related by historical sources such as authors Michel de Montaigne, Donald Winnicott, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The article focuses on the solitude of author Mary Wollstonecraft in her travels through Scandinavia during the writing of the book "Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden." Other topics include spiritual retreat and divine presence, the social aspects of the imagination, and landscapes in literature.

An essay is presented which discusses whether the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot was influenced by the work and views of poet Percy Shelley. The author notes Eliot's criticism of Shelley's work and Romantic views but suggests that Eliot shared many of Shelley's attitudes. He notes how Shelley's poem "Alastor" reflects concepts of identity and isolation present in Eliot's poem.

Presents literary criticism which examines instances of solitude in the novel "Dombey and Son" by Charles Dickens. Dickens' books are often busy with characters and moments of solitude are rare. The child character of Paul Dombey is often found alone and daydreaming. The author analyzes how these moments reveal his psychological state.