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This chapter begins with a discussion of a range of Coleridge's early writings in which he explores his uncertain faith in his ability to read the handwriting of God in nature. It then turns to Coleridge's Lectures on Revealed Religion (1795), in which his early debts to post-Newtonian natural religion are made explicit. Coleridge's poem, Religious Musings, is discussed. The chapter continues with a detailed examination of three important ‘Conversation’ poems: Fears in Solitude, France: an Ode, and Frost at Midnight published together in 1798, which further reveal Coleridge's religious uncertainty, and its connection with his sense of being fallen. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the poem, Dejection: An Ode, in which a state of creative sterility is again linked by the poet with a sense of being fallen.

This chapter discusses the poetic imaginings of war in the 1790s, particularly those of Charlotte Smith and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Smith's reconception of the role of ‘fancy’ in her blank-verse poem The Emigrants, begun during peacetime but completed in April 1793, forcefully illustrates the way in which the outbreak of war led one of the most popular and influential writers of the closing decades of the 18th century to transform her ideas of the imagination and to reconceive her poetic role. In Fears in Solitude, Coleridge addresses a nation distant from the scene of conflict and ultimately offers his own imagining as a model for the nation. The imagining of war, then, plays a major role in the development of the romantic imagination.

Through a close reading of two key moments of Richard II – the king’s return from Ireland and his later imprisonment and murder – this chapter demonstrates that, whilst the play develops an emotional investment in the trope of the lonely, isolated sovereign, sovereignty itself is imagined differently. Sovereignty is never contained within the lonely figure of a solitary man’s body but rather made manifest through an engagement with the world and, particularly, the organic with the machine, the “natural” with the “artificial”. This is a reading which is opposed to the dominant influence of Kantorowicz’s account of Richard II in The King’s Two Bodies, and that engages with Derrida’s consideration of Robinson Crusoe’s lonely sovereignty in the second volume of his The Beast and the Sovereign lectures.

This chapter draws together the findings of the research through an analysis of the creative and collaborative methods which were used throughout the Loneliness Connects Us research project. The partnership between academic (including feminist) research, youth work and creative arts practice produced situated knowledges critical to the success of this project. The immersive theatre performance ‘Missing’ is presented in detail in this chapter, to show how collaboration and creativity were harnessed before during and after the performances. Shared interests and creativity; solitude, creativity and solidarity; relationality, friendship and solidarity, and their part in practices of both collaborative research creation and socio-cultural animation are explored.

García Márquez has been regarded as one of the great writers of romantic love. His idea of love and the way he has written it is true in its form, which is both fearsome and joyous. García Márquez's fascination with love can be seen even in his earliest articles, where he tells of lovers reunited after many trials or of how technologies such as the telephone have changed the habits of courtship. Solitude is also a story of love, both familial and romantic. García Márquez's novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother is analyzed herein because of its depiction of love for sale, young love, and unrequited love happening in the Guajira desert. Another story discussed in this chapter is the Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which is a parody love story, García Márquez's darkest book so far.

García Márquez is not just another great author from Latin America but is considered as the symbol of creativity in Latin American letters in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His high art is coupled with common touch that enabled him to reach a fairly large audience and inspired affection among them. García Márquez's fame and public presence resemble that of Hugo in France, yet his reach is not just confined to Latin America but extends to other parts of the world too. García Márquez has inspired not just common readers but also other writers through his themes, subjects, and moods. He changed literature, and readers' thoughts on life and fiction, after his writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Born into the real-life horrors of World War II, besieged from a young age by looming Nazism, an oppressive ghetto, and the threat of potential concentration camp incarceration, Polanski endured an extended period of panicked solitude and a first-hand encounter with the true terrors of mankind. Surviving and thriving, his preliminary work in radio and theatre led to enrolment in the National Film School in Lodz and the creation of several short films, many of which introduce motifs common to Polanski’s succeeding output: inhibiting confines, sexual voyeurism, surrealism, and the sinister potency of inanimate objects. His debut feature, Knife in the Water (1962), a boldly perilous thriller, garnered Polanski widespread acclaim and notoriety, including an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. But as he struggled to begin his next proposed feature, “If Katelbach Comes,” Polanski was engaged by the horror movie-seeking Compton Group, a British studio known for exploitation and soft porn fare. The resulting production was Repulsion, written by Polanski and Gérard Brach and starring Catherine Deneuve.

This chapter examines three memoirs and a film that focus on fathers who were absent—literally and figuratively—from their children's lives: Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude; Louise Steinman's The Souvenir; Anna Cypra Oliver's Assembling My Father: A Daughter's Detective Story; and My Architect, a film written and directed by Nathaniel Kahn. Each narrative is characterized by an abiding melancholy, first for the child's missed opportunity to know the parent, then for the awakened reminder of loss as each writer engages in the challenging and frustrating task of describing the indescribable, reconstructing a barely perceptible figure, and confronting evidence that is fragile and questionable. All four works tackle the issue of how to understand a father who has had only a tangential relation to his child even though the latter argues for the centrality of that relation to his or her identity.

Another personal piece, this chapter traces the artistic beginnings and formation of the poet, Paula Meehan, former Chair of Irish Poetry, seen through the prism of a creative writing workshop delivered by John McGahern at the beginning of Meehan’s career, in Galway of 1979. The chapter brings closer McGahern the teacher and the mentor, contemplating his writing habits, his thoughts on the act of writing and on the accompanying solitude. The chapter considers McGahern’s views on the art of fiction and shows how passionately he emphasised, and tried to convey, the importance of working hard at writing, rewriting and starting again, being ruthless with oneself in order to ‘master the material’.

This chapter uses graffiti as a means to explore the issues of race, coming-of-age and gentrification in The Fortress of Solitude. Protagonist Dylan Ebdus sees graffiti as an “authentic” part of the old neighbourhood, Gowanus, before it is transformed into Boerum Hill. It is one of the chief things which binds him to his black childhood friend, Mingus Rude. But as the two boys grow up and drift apart, it also stands for their irrevocable difference. Later, Dylan uses graffiti culture, as well as soul music and comics, as a method of remediation, a way of revisiting and trying to come to terms with his overwhelming childhood and adolescent experiences.

This chapter focuses on Marga Richter's compositions during the 1980s. Hoping to build on her 1970s success, Richter wrote primarily symphonic and chamber music but also returned to writing vocal and choral music. In 1980 she completed her Spectral Chimes/Enshrouded Hills for three orchestral quintets and orchestra. The initial working title was “Music for Three Quintets and Orchestra,” but was expanded to Music for Three Orchestral Quintets and Orchestra. This chapter begins with a discussion of English and Irish influences on Richter's works before turning to some of her compositions of the period, including Exequy and Lament for Art O'Leary. It also examines Richter's Arizona-inspired pieces and her all-Richter concert in New York City; her visit to Germany and her works while in Düsselfdorf; her visit to China and Tibet that led her to write Qhanri (snow mountain): Tibetan Variations for cello and piano; and her 1985 piece Out of Shadows and Solitude for full orchestra. The chapter concludes with an overview of Richter's activities after the death of her husband Alan Skelly.

This chapter argues that Glenn Gould redefined the experience of the radio listener by subverting the conventional aesthetics of documentary radio. Using modernist collage-like techniques, Gould interferes with the verbal prerogatives of talk-based radio, moving a speech-centered genre in the direction of pure musicality. In the precarious balance between sound and sense that was increasingly typical of avant-garde radio, Gould’s Solitude Trilogy went out of its way to sabotage the latter, all the better to liberate the acoustic side of radio from what Gould viewed as the tyranny of language. Gould saw in radio an opportunity to use the human voice as a kind of musical instrument, but this could only be achieved by complex editing in which documentary subjects are recast, thanks to an ambitious course of tape-splicing, as sonic types and tonalities rather than as linguistically individuated subjects. The result of Gould’s “contrapuntal” approach to radio was a new mode of tuning in, in which semantic listening gave way to tonal listening.

This chapter examines Baudelaire’s inauguration of the prose poem in ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ and ‘La Solitude’. It examines the first versions of these poems, published in a collective volume (1855), and discusses ‘La Solitude’ in relation to an essay in the same volume by the journalist Hippolyte Castille, and with reference to the liberal economic theory of Frédéric Bastiat. These two poems are presented, in their original and revised versions, as reflecting two principal strands in Le Spleen de Paris: its articulations of the relationship between beauty and melancholy, and a playful engagement with broader moral, political, and philosophical issues that offers itself as an alternative to contemporary journalism. The two poems are proposed as paradigms of a strategy of resistance to dogmatically normative discourse and as a celebration of the poetic imagination in its assertion of the human right to be uncertain and to change one’s mind.

Part II works from the point of view of the reader of autobiography, and asks: what should we learn from autobiography? It argues for a lesson about selfhood and the good life, and specifically about the roles of narrative and of self-realization in those targets of human self-knowledge. This investigation addresses four questions: given that autobiographies are narratives, should we learn something from them about the importance of narrative in human life? Could our narration of our lives explain how their parts relate to them as wholes? Could it retrospectively unify them and thereby make them good for us? Could it create self-knowledge by interpretatively making the self? In each case it answers: no. The lesson we should learn here is instead about the centrality of self-realization to selfhood and the good life. To make that case, this part argues for pluralist realism about self-knowledge: autobiographies of self-discovery, martial life, and solitude show that the ‘self’ which is created and known by self-interpretation is, at best, one part of what we can know about ourselves, and not the most interesting part. These modes of self-discovery reveal a self that is unchosen, initially opaque to itself, and seedlike, which could not be a self-interpretation, and whose good is its realization.

Religion passes beyond the ken, the horizon, of reason, with faith its continuation, Coleridge tells us. Chapter 15 reflects on Coleridge’s illuminating metaphor of twilight, night, and the starry heavens to see how the experiential forms it draws on can affect our understanding of terms like ‘reason’ and ‘faith’. Tentatively suppressing those terms, it concentrates on the metaphor and the experience, to see where they lead without the leash of orthodox doctrine controlling the interpretation. Preserving ‘the Soul steady and concentered in its Trance of inward Adoration’ is the crucial experience. Twilight stealing into darkness and into night suggests progressing stillness, its associated concentration opening up a real prospect, the starry heavens, ordinarily concealed by the light of day and quotidian clamour. A reflection on Buddhist meditational traditions is included; concentration or samadhi as a condition of awakening, seeing things as they are, associated with ‘compassion’ or karuna.