Research Catalog

Love : a history in five fantasies

Title

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

Author

Rosenwein, Barbara H.

Publication

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Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Request in advance	BF575.L8 R68 2022	Off-site

Description

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

Summary

"A learned guide through the labyrinth of love"--
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.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Contents

Like-mindedness -- Transcendence -- Obligation -- Obsession -- Insatiability.

ISBN

LCCN

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries