Modern love : romance, intimacy, and the marriage crisis / David R. Shumway.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shumway, David R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Marriage.

Marriage in popular culture.

Marriage in literature.

Marriage in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xi, 269 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2003]

Summary:

"My ideas of romance came from the movies," said Woody Allen in a 1993 Rolling Stone interview, and it is to the movies -- as well as to novels, advice columns, and self-help books -- that David R. Shumway turns for his history of modern love. Modern Love argues that a crisis in the meaning and experience of marriage emerged when it lost its institutional function of controlling the distribution of property, and instead came to be seen as a locus for feelings of desire, togetherness, and loss. Over the course of the twentieth century, partly in response to this crisis, a new language of love -- "intimacy" -- emerged, not so much replacing but rather coexisting with the earlier language of "romance." Reading a wide range of texts, from early twentieth-century advice columns and their late twentieth-century antecedent, the relationship self-help book, to Hollywood screwball comedies and their return in the 1980s and 90s, and from the "relationship films" of Woody Allen and his successors to contemporary realist novels about marriages, Shumway argues that the kinds of stories the culture has told itself have changed, and explores what it is that these stories about love and relationships have been teaching. Part layperson's history of marriage and romance, part meditation on intimacy itself, Modern Love will be both amusing and interesting to almost anyone who thinks about relationships (and who doesn't?).

Contents:

Introduction: A Brief History of Love 1

I Romance 29

1 Romance in the Romance and the Novel 31

2 Romancing Marriage: Advice Books and the Crisis 63

3 Marriage as Adultery: Hollywood Romance and the Screwball Comedy 81

4 Power Struggles: Casablanca and Gone with the Wind 110

II Intimacy 131

5 Talking Cures: The Discourse of Intimacy 133

6 Relationship Stories 157

7 Marriage Fiction 188

Conclusion: Other Media, Other Discourses: The Crisis Continues 215.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0814798306

0814798314

OCLC:

51566409