カバーデザインも決定しました。元々は既存の写真かイラストを使う予定だったのですが、似たテーマを扱っている他の研究書もそれを使っているため、結局は使えないことに。マーケットの中で研究書を出すということは、競合する研究書と差異化を図らなければならず、自分の本が「商品」なのだと改めて思わされました。
そこで、デザイナーがオリジナルの表紙を作ってくれました。個人が孤独でありつつ、実は接続もされているという、本書の議論の基盤となっている "networked solitude" というアイディアをうまく可視化してくれていて、気に入っています。
発売は来年の二月初頭になるようです。
以下、アマゾンの紹介文をそのまま載せます：
An innovative and timely examination of the concept of solitude in nineteenth-century American literature
During the
nineteenth century, the United States saw radical developments in media and
communication that reshaped concepts of spatiality and temporality. As the
telegraph, the postal system, and public transportation became commonplace, the
country achieved a level of connectedness that was never possible before. At
this level, physical isolation no longer equaled psychological separation from
the exterior world, and as communication networks proliferated, being
disconnected took on negative cultural connotations.
Though
solitude, and the lack thereof, is a pressing concern in today’s culture of
omnipresent digital connectivity, Yoshiaki Furui shows that solitude has been a
significant preoccupation since the nineteenth-century. The obsession over
solitude is evidenced by many writers of the period, with consequences for many
basic notions of creativity, art, and personal and spiritual fulfillment.
In
Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature, Furui examines, among other works, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden,
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Herman Melville’s
“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters, and
telegraphic literature in the 1870s to identify the virtues and values these
writers bestowed upon solitude in a time and place where it was being
consistently threatened or devalued. Although each writer has a unique way of
addressing the theme, they all aim to reclaim solitude as a positive,
productive state of being that is essential to the writing process and personal
identity. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach to understand modern solitude
and the resulting literature, Furui seeks to historicize solitude by anchoring
literary works in this revolutionary yet interim period of American
communication history, while also applying theoretical insights into the
literary analysis.
Review
“An
engaging discussion of how the developments of the nineteenth-century
communications revolution changed the ways in which writers in the United
States came to understand the categories of solitude and loneliness in the
middle decades of the century.”
—Les
Harrison, author of The Temple and the Forum: The American Museum and Cultural
Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman
“In its
reclamation of solitude as a productive state of being, Modernizing Solitude
joins recent writing that argues for a degree of off-the-grid, more meditative
existence to curb social media addiction. As such, it would appeal to those who
seek models of moderation, or who are at least curious about the ways in which
historical figures negotiated their media consumption in order to remain
productive individuals.”
—John M.
Picker, author of Victorian Soundscapes
About the
Author
Yoshiaki
Furui is an associate professor of English at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. He
has published scholarship in Journal of American Studies, Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.
