Love : a history / Simon May.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

May, Simon (Simon Philip Walter)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Love--History.

Love.

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 294 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2011.

Summary:

'Philosophers, theologians and intellectual historians have all talked about love, but until now there has not been a history of love - the idea and the emotion - in its bewilderingly many varieties. Simon May has given us such a history - and more.'

'Simon May's Love is that rarest of achievements: scholarship as inspired illumination. Fluent, witty, humane, May explores Western concepts of love from the Torah to Romanticism and on to the "fascinating paradox" that the liberation of sex and marriage in our day coexists with retrograde, and at times destructive, notions of love. May offers a corrective, and the reasoning that takes us there is an utterly riveting adventure.'

'A beautifully written and fascinating account of the cultural history of love, from the Hebrew Bible to the time when, of all the things that have called for our worship, only love remains. Simon May gives a vindication of love that is both deeply insightful and inspiring, and, whether you believe that God is love or that Love is god, you will find your portrait in this book and rejoice in it.'

'May's enquiry into the nature of love is an amazing tour de force: surprising, provocative, refreshing and instructive by turns, it surpasses everything hitherto written on this subject in its scope and ambition.' Book jacket.

Contents:

Love plays God

The foundation of Western love : Hebrew scripture

From physical desire to paradise : Plato

Love as perfect friendship : Aristotle

Love as sexual desire : Lucretius and Ovid

Love as the supreme virtue : Christianity

Why Christian love isn't unconditional

Women on top : love and the troubadours

How human nature became loveable : from the high Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Love as joyful understanding of the whole : Spinoza

Love as enlightened romanticism : Rousseau

Love as religion : Schlegel and Novalis

Love as the urge to procreate : Schopenhauer

Love as affirmation of life : Nietzsche

Love as a history of loss : Freud

Love as terror and tedium : Proust

Love reconsidered.

ISBN:

9780300118308

0300118309

OCLC:

670481484