Please help today!! isolation and alienation themes in American Lit?

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why is alienation (social, actual, emotional and spiritual detachment) a recurring theme in so many works in the 18thC to the present?

-- Anonymous, December 10, 2002

Answers

it does

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2003

it's a fact of life

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2003

Because the things that people connect to the most in writing is sadness. People write more when they're pained about something. The pain that many writers goo through is that detachment that they write about, because poets and writers are often outcasts from the rest if society because by definition, in my opinion, an artist doesn't conform to those 'norms' that society sets. They have their own vision, and people shun them for it. This pain comes out through the writing. That's why it is a recurring theme.

-- Anonymous, October 28, 2003

Isolation is something alot of people go through at some point in their life. Writers are bohemians, their artists. As sad as it sounds, the whole starving artist outcast thing is the driving force behind most 19th & 20th century novelists. Themes need to be something everyone relates to. Novels like Catcher in the Rye, express a feeling almost universal to all teenagers. besides, what fun would it be to read about someone who's life is perfect, and who never feels sad?

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2004

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