New Dangerous Liaisons

Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century

Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, Alexander C.T. Geppert

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781845457365
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781845459765
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal. In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities.

Table of contents

• New Dangerous Liaisons
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Historicising Love: Points de Repère/Points of Reference
• Chapter 1. Love and Religion: Comparative Comments
• Chapter 2. The Rule of Love: The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective
• Chapter 3. Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation in Twentieth Century European Contexts
• Chapter 4. Overseas Europeans: Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy
• Chapter 5. 'Window to Europe': The Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject
• Part II. Public and Private Loves
• Chapter 6. Love in the Time of Revolution: The Polish Poets of Café Ziemianska
• Chapter 7. Love, Marriage and Divorce: American and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII
• Chapter 8. 'Dear Adolf!': Locating Love in Nazi Germany
• Chapter 9. Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation in the Revista de Occidente 1926–1936
• Chapter 10. Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s
• Part III. European Borders and Cultural Differences in Love Relations
• Chapter 11. Between Europe and the Atlantic: The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism
• Chapter 12. The 'Volkskorper' in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic
• Chapter 13. Anica Savic Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War
• Chapter 14. Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam
• Contributors
• Select Bibliography
• Index