Romance Writing (Cultural History of Literature)

Romance Writing explores the changing nature of both the romancegenre and the discourse of romantic love from the seventeenthcentury to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the first studiesto approach romantic love as both genre and discourse in more thansixty years.Faced with the challenge of writing a cultural history for what iscommonly understood to be one of lifes most universal, a-historicaland cross-cultural phenomena, Lynne Pearce has invoked the conceptof the gift to calculate loves added value at differentcultural/historical moments. Building upon those philosophicaltraditions which have argued for the powerfully transformativenature of romantic love, Pearce shows how in the history ofliterature lovers have utilized its spark to change not onlythemselves, but also their worlds, through acts of creativity andheroism. The gift of love ranges from the simple gift of a name inthe seventeenth century, through notions of immortality,self-sacrifice and selfhood in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, through to the liberating temporal and spatialdislocations of the postmodern age. The opening chapter, TheAlchemy of Love, also undertakes an in-depth engagement of thechanging nature, and meaning, of romantic love.Providing a judicious blend of close reading and cultural history,Romance Writing will be essential reading for undergraduatestudents as well as postgraduates and scholars working in thefield, while also offering much of interest to the general reader.