Love : a history in five fantasies / Barbara H. Rosenwein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosenwein, Barbara H., author.

Contributor:

Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Love.

Medical Subjects:

Love.

Physical Description:

ix, 232 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : color illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2022.

Summary:

"A learned guide through the labyrinth of love"-- Provided by publisher.

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.--Publisher website.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Like-Mindedness

2. Transcendence

3. Obligation

4. Obsession

5. Insatiability.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Rosenwein, Barbara H. Love

ISBN:

9781509531837

1509531831

OCLC:

1229142792