RESEARCH ARTICLE
Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness and Lone Living
K. D. M. Snell*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 8
First Page: 61
Last Page: 70
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-8-61
DOI: 10.2174/1874350101508010061
Article History:
Received Date: 25/10/2014Revision Received Date: 30/01/2015
Acceptance Date: 02/02/2015
Electronic publication date: 15/5/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
This article opens up approaches and themes for a history of loneliness. It advocates handling of the subject by historians, and invites historical analysis of concepts, health issues, strategies from the past, theories of long-term loneliness change, „nuclear family hardship‟ and related demography. Topographies of isolation are raised. It then discusses one aspect of this: considering how living alone often seems to shape modern discussion of loneliness, and analysing the steep rise of sole living in Western societies over the past century.