Description
Book Synopsis In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal. In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities.
Trade Review "This is a wonderful collection of richly textured, suggestive, and often meticulous essays that interrogate the inter-twined histories of love and European identity. Imaginative readings of diverse archives that go deep into Europe's pasts and extend sideways to her colonies and margins will make this volume indispensable to all contemporary debates on the 'meanings of Europe'. It will also speak to readers far beyond the geographical confines of the continent." · Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South
Asian Studies
Table of Contents Acknowledgments
Introduction
Luisa Passerini
PART I: HISTORICIZING LOVE: POINTS DE REPÈRE/ POINTS OF REFERENCE
Chapter 1. Love and Religion: Comparative Comments
Jack Goody
Chapter 2. The Rule of Love: The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective
William M. Reddy
Chapter 3. Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation in Twentieth Century European Contexts
Alf Lüdtke
Chapter 4. Overseas Europeans: Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy
Liliana Ellena
Chapter 5. 'Window to Europe': Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject
Almira Ousmanova
PART II: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LOVES
Chapter 6. Love in the Time of Revolution: The Polish Poets of Café Ziemiańska
Marci Shore
Chapter 7. Love, Marriage and Divorce: American and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII
Alexis Schwarzenbach
Chapter 8. 'Dear Adolf!': Locating Love in Nazi Germany
Alexander C.T. Geppert
Chapter 9. Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation. The 'Revista de Occidente' and the Creation of a Culture, 1923-1936
Alison Sinclair
Chapter 10. Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s
Jo Labanyi
PART III: EUROPEAN BORDERS AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN LOVE RELATIONS
Chapter 11. Between Europe and the Atlantic: The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism Margarida
Calafate Ribeiro
Chapter 12. The 'Volkskörper' in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic
Sandra Mass
Chapter 13. Anica Savić Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War
Svetlana Slapšak
Chapter 14. Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam
Ruth Mas
Notes on Contributors
Index
