This book aims at explaining romantic love between straight adults through literary texts of the western canon from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Each chapter comes with a multidisciplinary approach in which protagonists are mutilated in their quest for loving as alternative to annihilation.

The book emphasizes love as an obsession, thus as an exploration of the mind. From the passion-myth of Tristan and Isolde to the nihilist modernist representations, the western world has created a perverse concept of love. A love for nothingness, for death. Narcissistic and at times destructive, love is gained by overcoming obstacles. If without obstacles there is no love, then love becomes love for obstacles. Within this masochistic frame, love, falling in love, being loved always stand at the edge of pathology.

At its core this book narrates a love story, more precisely a story of loves, the haunting evocation of a desire that by its very nature cannot be fulfilled. Inherent in the nature of love is a subtle dialectical activity between presence and absence, between creation and destruction, reality and void. Accordingly, the narrative raises questions that the past two centuries were incapable of answering. Does love only last the time of a kiss? Is its promise fatally destined to dissolve? What about violence? Physical, emotional, temporal. Is it an ineliminable part of love or its most extreme profanation? And what is the mystery that accompanies loves that know how to last without resigning themselves to the death of desire? It is to answer some of these questions that I wrote this text. Love is an unconscious process that dominates reason and destroys it when reason cannot be a mode of communication. Hence, the amorous romance is madness and this text is written as a loud reminder.

Endorsement

A unique and surprising book about love. A book that goes against the grain, offering the reader an evocative feeling of suspension between desire and the uncertainty of its fulfilment.

A daring book whose reading is a must because it offers a new perspective not yet encountered elsewhere.

Barbara Sonzogni - Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Autorentext

Alberto Castelli is a writer and Professor of Humanities at Hainan University, China. He has published widely on modernism, postmodern dynamics, and cross-cultural studies. He is the author of "Perspectives on Asia: is China Kitsch?" (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and "Bipolarism in the Nineteenth Century Novel" (University of Toronto Quarterly, 2023). Most recently Castelli's publications include: "Eros and Thanatos. Love Across Civilizations" (Vernon Press, 2023) and "The Labyrinth of Love A Tale of Latin American Romance" (Routledge, 2024).