Poetics of Isolation in English Literature (17th-21st Century)

• Applicant: Dr. Anne Rüggemeier
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495531926

This project investigates the highly ambivalent phenomenon and practice of isolation in its historical and discursive diversity. Focusing on the analysis and interpretation of lyrical, dramatic and epic texts from 17th to 21st English literature such as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), female Retirement Poetry of the 18th century, post-war drama and the negotiation of isolation as a 'social epidemic' and finally a 'pandemic' in contemporary texts, the project also includes a discussion of relevant contemporary literature on the politics and poetics of isolation in the context of Covid-19 and the Brexit. The literary case studies are discussed in dialogue with religious, medical, philosophical and socio-political discourses of the respective time. Methodologically the project relies on close reading and the tools of cultural narratology. These methods are complemented with theories and concepts from phenomenology, gender studies, the medical humanities, as well as interdisciplinary research on space, islands and borders as well as New Formalism. On this methodological and theoretical basis the project pursues the following goals: (1) to compile a historically informed definition of the ambivalent and multi-layered notion of isolation, (2) to develop a (prototypical) model for the diachronic analysis of literary isolation scenarios, (3) to undertake, on the basis of this model, a diachronic study of selected literary texts that takes into account spatial, social, psychopathological, and geopolitical negotiations of isolation, (4) to explore the literary procedures, stylistic and formal devices as well as the generic affordances that are exploited to represent, reflect on and re-shape experiences and discourses of isolation, and (5) to investigate the functions that literary representations and (re)negotiations of isolation can fulfil within the broader cultural imaginary, addressing the extent to which isolation as a topos, a metaphor and a cultural narrative shapes the perception, the understanding and the attribution of values in current and historical debates.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants