Modern Love

Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis

David Shumway

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780814798317
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814788509
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

“My ideas of romance came from the movies,” said Woody Allen, and it is to the movies—as well as to novels, advice columns, and self-help books—that David Shumway turns for his history of modern love.
Modern Love argues that a crisis in the meaning and experience of marriage emerged when it lost its institutional function of controlling the distribution of property, and instead came to be seen as a locus for feelings of desire, togetherness, and loss. Over the course of the twentieth century, partly in response to this crisis, a new language of love—“intimacy”—emerged, not so much replacing but rather coexisting with the earlier language of “romance.”
Reading a wide range of texts, from early twentieth-century advice columns and their late twentieth-century antecedent, the relationship self-help book, to Hollywood screwball comedies, and from the “relationship films” of Woody Allen and his successors to contemporary realist novels about marriages, Shumway argues that the kinds of stories the culture has told itself have changed. Part layperson’s history of marriage and romance, part meditation on intimacy itself, Modern Love will be both amusing and interesting to almost anyone who thinks about relationships (and who doesn’t?).

Index

Adair, Richard, 17

Adam’s Rib (Cukor), 82, 89, 92

reversal of screwball genre conventions in, 100–103

Addicted to Romance (Hardwick), 74

Adultery, 14, 191, 201, 253n. 13

and gender roles, 125

and Elinor Glyn, 74–78

in intimacy advice books, 144–45, 173

in marriage fiction, 188–89, 191–92, 193, 194, 196, 197–98, 200

in medieval romance, 15

in relationship stories, 173, 178–79

in the romance novel, 54, 58–59

in screwball comedies, 91, 105, 107

Adultery in the Novel (Tanner), 54, 189

Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The, 216

Advice books, 19, 25–26, 63–80, 133–156, 157, 158, 163, 170, 173, 174, 182, 185, 188, 192, 195, 199, 201, 204, 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 231, 249n. 8

male and female styles in, 251n. 51

Affair to Remember, An (McCarey), 221

Affleck, Ben, 221

After Vows Were Spoken (Stein), 253n. 8

Age of Innocence (Wharton), 52–58, 60, 111, 198

Aiello, Danny, 108

Alger, Horatio, 96

Allen, Woody, 81, 86, 168, 169, 179, 205, 212, 217, 231, 251n. 2

Annie Hall, 103, 107, 159–61, 162, 163–65, 170–72, 173, 176–77, 183, 186, 251n. 2

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, 172

Hannah and Her Sisters, 176

Husbands and Wives, 157, 161–62, 165, 172, 173, 176, 177, 183–87

Manhattan, 103, 161, 165–67, 174, 175, 176–79, 183, 184–86

American Novel and Its Tradition (Chase), 239n. 39

Amos, Tori, 219

Amour courtois. See Love, courtly

Amour passion, 18

Andreas Capellanus, Art of Courtly Love, The, 14, 64

Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 238n. 22

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 188, 193

Annie Hall (Allen), 103, 107, 183, 186

as case history, 159–61, 163

as relationsh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• part1 Romance
• part2 Intimacy
• Conclusion: Other Media, Other Discourses: The Crisis Continues
• Notes
• Index
• Author