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Palgrave Macmillan

Writing Early Modern Loneliness

  • Book
  • Jun 2024

Overview

  • The first extended study of loneliness in the early modern era
  • Challenges existing theories of the development of this emotion as we understand it today
  • Examines previously unpublished sermons, manuscripts, journals and correspondence

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History (EMLH)

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Keywords

  • Early Modern Literature
  • Loneliness
  • Isolation
  • History of the Emotions
  • Literary History
  • Renaissance Literature
  • Seventeenth Century Literature
  • Shakespeare
  • Milton
  • Anne Boleyn
  • Homer
  • Spenser

About this book

This interdisciplinary collection of ten essays is the first to redefine historical conceptions of “loneliness” in the Western world by exploring its manifestation in early modern textual sources. Contrary to current scholarly consensus that loneliness in Britain was understood as an emotion from the late eighteenth century, only beginning to emerge in its literary form in the writings of the Romantic poets, the contributors in this volume argue that early modern people were capable of complex and conflicting feelings of social and emotional isolation which were expressed in a wide range of writings. Moreover, these products of loneliness continue to resonate poignantly with humanity today.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

    Hannah Yip

  • University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Thomas Clifton

About the editors

Hannah Yip is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her current research interests centre on the cultural and emotional lives of clergymen in the English Reformation. She has held Fellowships at the Huntington Library, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and the John Rylands Library, and her work has been published in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Reformation. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Brill volume, A Companion to Preaching and the Sermon in the Twentieth Century, edited by Keith A. Francis and Robert Ellison.

 

Thomas Clifton PhD MA PGCE (PCET) is a Lecturer in Academic Writing at the Centre for Academic Writing, Coventry University. Thomas completed an AHRC-funded PhD on “Textual Practices in Meditative Writing, 1661–1678” at the University of Birmingham and an MA in early modern literature at Bangor University. Thomas’s research interests include dialogical thought processes in meditative, reflective, and self-writing, historically and contemporarily, and the fluidity of genre in the early modern period. Thomas is currently developing research for publication on John Flavel and Thomas Traherne.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Writing Early Modern Loneliness

  • Editors: Hannah Yip, Thomas Clifton

  • Series Title: Early Modern Literature in History

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-55051-5Due: 07 July 2024

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-55054-6Due: 07 July 2024

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-55052-2Due: 07 July 2024

  • Series ISSN: 2634-5919

  • Series E-ISSN: 2634-5927

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Illustrations: 10 illustrations in colour

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