Love A History in Five Fantasies

We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgments. Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs, and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire. Each has had a long and tangled history with lasting effects on how we in the West think about love today. Yet each leads to a different conclusion about what we should strive for in our relationships. If only we could peel back the layers of love and discover its "true" essence. But love doesn't work like that; it is constructed on the shards of experience, story, and feeling, shared over time, intertwined with other fantasies. By understanding the history of how we have loved, Rosenwein argues, we may better navigate our own tumultuous experiences and perhaps write our own scripts.

ISBN:	9781509531837
Publisher:	Polity Press
Imprint:	Polity Press
Published date:	01 Oct 2021
DEWEY:	152.41
DEWEY edition:	23
Language:	English
Number of pages:	x, 232 , 16 unnumbered of plates
Weight:	486g
Height:	147mm
Width:	221mm
Spine width:	29mm

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