Explore the vast range of titles available.

Offering an unusual and exceptionally clear insight into Shakespeare's philosophy and a viewpoint seldom considered, this book argues that his philosophy was consistent, consciously held, and profoundly Christian. Showing that Shakespeare appreciated the danger faced in writing at a time of major religious intolerance, it explains how the playwright used the medieval allegory of love to veil his ideas. Fresh and fascinating, this record also demonstrates that, even in his earliest work, Shakespeare was moving toward the universal ideas of love, forgiveness, and regeneration.Love's Labour Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona,andRomeo and Julietare discussed at length.

Liebe beschreibt ein Gefühl, eine Einstellung, einen Gedanken, eine Erfahrung, die Menschen zu dem Wichtigsten in ihrem Leben zählen. Die Liebe, zu anderen Menschen, zu Tieren, zu Gott, zu Göttern oder die von ihnen empfangene Liebe findet sich in höchst unterschiedlicher Gestalt und Bedeutung. Hat Liebe ihren wesentlichen Ausdruck in der Freundschaft, in der geschlechtlichen Vereinigung, in einem rituellen Vollzug oder in einem göttlichen Handeln? Der vorliegende Band besitzt seinen Schwerpunkt in der Frage, wie in den Religionen Liebe verstanden wird. Gerade im Christentum haben sich verschiedene Vorstellungen entwickelt, Gott, Mensch und Liebe miteinander zu denken. Doch auch philosophische und sich mit geistlicher und weltlicher Literatur beschäftigende Beiträge eröffnen entscheidende Perspektiven auf das unerschöpfliche Phänomen der Liebe.

\"Find your one true love and live happily ever after.\" The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the BiblicalSong of Songsto Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating, and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars. Catherine M. Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter-ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the reader deep into Romancelandia where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness, love, sex, and desire in American popular culture.

This is the first study to apply some of the results of modern cognitive science to all the major genres of the courtly love literature of medieval France (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) in Occitan, Old French, and Latin.

A surfeit of tropes about love exhausted Spanish literature in the age of Cervantes. This book provides a pioneering look at the rich array of ways in which Spanish Golden Age authors responded by crafting a new literary aesthetic.

Traditional Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms of love started to show clear signs of inadequacy and exhaustion in the sixteenth century. How did the Spanish Golden Age recast worn out discourses of love and make them compelling again? This volume explores how Spanish letters recognized that old love paradigms, especially the crisis of the subject, presented an extraordinary opportunity for revising traditional literary strictures. As a result, during Spain’s nascent modernity, literature took up the challenge to expand existing forms of desire and subjectivity. A range of scholars show how canonical and non-canonical Golden Age writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de la Torre y Sevil became equal agents of the sweeping ontological reconfiguration of the idea of eros that defined their culture. Such reconfiguration includes: the troubling displacement of self and other seen in sentimental genres like the pastoral or romance; the overlapping of emotions such as love and jealousy characteristic of the baroque lyric and dramatic production; and the conflation of axioms such as eros and eris prevalent in contemporaneous epic experiments. In uniting the findings of often surprising texts, the collection of essays in Goodbye Eros takes a pioneering look at how Golden Age moral, ideological, scientific, and literary discourses intersected to create fascinating re-elaborations of the trope of love.

You can't scratch (in public) As it moves down your body...

Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript-a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament-Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of \"courtly love\" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers. The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

This book offers both a philosophical and psychological theory of an aspect of human love, first noted by Plato and used by Freud in developing psychoanalysis (transference love), namely, lovers as mirrors for one another, enabling them thus better to see and understand themselves and others. Shakespeare's art makes the same appeal--theater as a communal mirror--expressing the artist holding a loving mirror for his culture at a point of transitional crisis between a shame and guilt culture. The book shows how Shakespeare's plays offer better insights into the behavior of violent men than Freud's, based on close empirical study of violent criminals; develops a theory of violence rooted in the moral emotions of shame and guilt; and a cultural psychology of the transition from shame to guilt cultures. The work argues that violence is, contra Freud, not an ineliminable instinct in the nature of things, requiring autocracy, but arises from patriarchally inflicted cultural injuries to the love of equals that undermine democracy, and that only a therapy based on love can address such injuries, replacing retributive with restorative justice, and populist fascist autocracy with constitutional democracy. Love, thus understood, underlies a range of disparate phenomena: the appeal of Shakespeare's theater as a communal art; the role of love in psychoanalysis; in Augustine's conception of love in religion (disfigured by his patriarchal assumptions); in Kant's anti-utilitarian ethics of dignity; in a naturalistic ethics that roots ethics in facts of human psychology; the role of law in democratic cultures as a mirror and critique of such cultures; and the basis of an egalitarian theory of universal human rights (inspired by Kant and developed, more recently, by John Rawls). In all these domains, uncritically accepted forms of culture (the initiation of men and women into patriarchy) traumatize the love of equals, and thus disfigure and distort our personal and political lives.

This first English translation of Le Roman de Waldef makes a significant representative of the French literature of medieval England accessible for the first time. Its wide-ranging content provides an ideal introduction to a number of themes in medieval literature, making it suitable for a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. The fast-moving romance plot of this early thirteenth-century tale recounts the ancestry and exploits of Waldef and his two sons, set against a history of pre-Conquest England. The narrative shares themes and incident types with other important insular romances, including the Lai of Haveloc, Boeve de Haumtone, and Gui de Warewic. Waldef’s scope, interest in battle, and political stratagems bear reading alongside medieval chronicles, while secret love affairs connect it with other romance literature of the period, and adventures across a wide area of the known world provide affinities with medieval travel narrative.