Acknowledgements
Preface: No (Wo)man is an island
Introduction: Loneliness as a 'modern epidemic'
1: When 'oneliness' became loneliness: the birth of a modern
emotion
2: A 'disease of the blood'? The chronic loneliness of Sylvia
Plath
3: Loneliness and lack: romantic love, from Wuthering Heights to
Twilight
4: Widowhood and loss: from Thomas Turner to the Widow of
Windsor
5: Instaglum? Social media and the making of online community
6: A 'ticking timebomb'? Rethinking loneliness in old age
7: Roofless and rootless: no place to call 'home'
8: Feeding the hunger. Materiality and the neglected lonely
body
9: Lonely clouds and empty vessels. When loneliness is a gift
Conclusion: reframing loneliness in a neoliberal age
Further reading
Appendix
Fay Bound Alberti is a Reader in History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of York. She is a TED speaker and has published widely on medicine, the body, gender and emotion in books and scholarly articles as well as in the media. She has taught at universities around the UK including UCL, Lancaster, Manchester, and York.
A compassionate, wide-ranging study.
*Terry Eagleton, The Guardian*
In addition to Alberti's sharp political analysis, one of the most
powerful themes in her book is how varied loneliness is, how
embedded it is in our lives, how extensively it evades
generalisation. Maybe loneliness is a 21st-century epidemic, a
modern illness requiring an urgent response, but its also so much
more than that.
*Sophie McBain, The New Statesman*
Alberti conveys the ambivalence of loneliness as we now conceive of
it, its mingling of horror and desirability in a machine age.
*Jane O'Grady, Literary Review*
A wonderful biography of loneliness by a brilliant socio-cultural
historian.
*James Daybell, Histories of the Unexpected*
With wit and grace, Fay Bound Alberti traces the story of an
often-painful emotion through its many guises and transformations.
By showing that loneliness is not an existential universal but
rather has causes and contexts, this book is itself a balm for
anyone who has felt its stabs in the thick of crowded cities or
amidst the chatter of social media.
*Professor Barbara H. Rosenwein, Loyola University Chicago*
Beginning with the intriguing argument that loneliness is a modern
emotional phenomenon, Fay Bound Alberti traces many facets and
factors leading up to the current loneliness dilemma. The book
contributes both to several facets in the history of emotion over
the past two centuries, and to a humane understanding of the issues
and possibilities involved today.
*Dr Peter Stearns, George Mason University*
This fascinating book explores an increasingly central experience
in our society-loneliness. Bound Alberti does a wonderful job of
explaining where do all lonely people come from, and where do they
all belong. The nuanced picture she draws has real potential to
help us better understand, cope with, and reduce the most
significant epidemic of our time. The author makes a particularly
valuable distinction between fleeting and chronic loneliness. While
fleeting loneliness can boost creativity and enhance emotional and
spiritual clarity, chronic lonelinesswhich involves an existential
sense of meaningless lackis devastatingly destructive. I highly
recommend this important book for all readers.
*Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, author of The Arc of Love*
Why is loneliness such a major concern in western societies? In
this thoughtful, thought-provoking book Fay Bound Alberti traces
modern loneliness from its nineteenth-century cultural and
demographic origins to its latest incarnation as a health
emergency, a scourge of western society. Exploring diverse
experiences of loneliness - from William Wordsworths famous lonely
as a cloud to Sylvia Plaths desperate description of it as a
disease of the blood - Bound Alberti provides a compelling account
of the causes and consequences of loneliness in an age when
community solidarities are at a premium.
*Barbara Taylor, Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University
of London; principal investigator on Wellcome Trust funded project,
'Pathologies of Solitude, 18th-21st Century'*
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