While most artists choose only temporary seclusion, the withdrawal to a room of ones own can also be taken to the extreme. Ed. A set of two contributions traces cultures of solitude from the nineteenth to the twentieth century from a literary, sociological, and cultural perspective, focusing on society, spirituality, and religion. Shipping in approx. Self-help books trade on stories of people who have transformed themselves from depressed solitaries into social butterflies (Moran, What). Regardless of the specific place the solitary inhabits, her/his abode is a liminal space. The path to spiritual enlightenment is often paved by the neglect of bodily needs. Are you scared that your paper will not make the grade? Billy Brown. Proceed to pay for the paper so that it can be assigned to one of our expert academic writers. When he also refuses to conform to the conventions of supposedly proper nourishment, he more than simply turns into a vegetarian (23), as his boss assumes. Last resort, if the above does not work, we will refund your money. Cultures of solitude in the US are of particular interest because solitude is directly related to concepts of individual independence and liberty which are venerable American ideals. More specifically, Thoreau extolls the joys and satisfactions of a simple life. Scott Slovic presents the unique social and pedagogical experiment of the University of Idahos Semester in the Wild program, which sends a dozen undergraduate students into the largest wilderness in North America for three months to study various aspects of wilderness, including literature and writing. Margaretta M. Lovell ponders the dichotomies and contradictions of the idea of solitude in nineteenth-century paintings by American artists, among them Sanford Gifford, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and John Frederick Kensett, with regard to Thoreaus meditations on solitude in Walden in her contribution Thoreau and the Landscapes of Solitude: Painted Epiphanies in Undomesticated Nature. Hlne Quanquin focuses on the main paradox in the cultural history of nineteenth-century abolitionists, who fought for liberty for others while they themselves were living a life of limitation and withdrawal in The World to Each Other: The Joint Politics of Isolation and Reform among Garrisonian Abolitionists..
what is the overall message of thoreau's "solitude"?