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The present essay collects the singular plurality of love, its countless forms and expressions in the figure of the tear, where love weeps and breaks at once. In this equivocation, the tear signifies the possibility of all relation, in which love operates as pure potentiality. Arranged in two parts and a coda the essay examines the genealogy of an ongoing theoretical exclusion of the potential of love from politics. It argues that love in its singular plurality must be placed at the heart of every revolutionary and emancipatory project in the service of difference. Accordingly it turns to Elizabeth Smart’s writing, where the twofold figure of the tear sets the stakes of love into relief, demonstrating the debt love incurs in the unfolding of its immense potential, which makes possible an incessant recreation of the world. Language finds here the means to relate the experience of rupture and liquidation of the self, an experience violent and creative in equal measure. The essay closes with the summative significance of love’s potentiality as the force that sets into motion a task that surpasses itself, a cause for which its infinite power is bound to prove insufficient yet evermore indispensible.

Redrawing established boundaries between genres, Podnieks builds a broad critical and theoretical range on which she maps the diary as an aesthetic work, showing how diaries inscribe the aesthetics of literary modernisms. Drawing on feminist theory, literary history, biography, and personal anecdotes, she argues that the diary is an especially subversive space for women writers. Podnieks details how Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin wrote their diaries under the pretence that they were private, while always intending them to be published. She travelled extensively to examine the original diary manuscripts and offers unique first-hand descriptions of the manuscripts that underscore the artistic intentions of their authors.

Frojdendahl examines how Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept employs the concept of passion in the sacred sense of the Passion of Christ and in the profane sense of erotic love. Her argument shows how intertextual links between theology and literature can lead to challenging and provocative analysis of passionate love.

(1913–86), Canadian born writer, born in Ottawa, but long resident in England. She is remembered for her

[...]it is predominantly a poetic rendering of her inner life, which is characterized by her desire for her lover and her agony when he eventually abandons her. [...]because the narrator goes unnamed, the text implicitly proposes what Philippe Lejeune has called a \"phantasmatic pact\" with its reader, under which the narrator gains an ambiguous status akin to that of the speaker of a lyric poem: she may or may not be taken to be an incarnation of the author (27). [...]the desire to locate Smart in her novel is a particularly melancholic one, as critics become producers of texts themselves, creating a paratextual discourse that constantly attempts-and necessarily fails-to install the author at the centre of discussions about her text by treating the text as a monument to her. Upset at the depiction of the narrator's parents, her act of critical commentary in 1945 was to buy and burn the six copies of By Grand Central Station that she found in an Ottawa bookstore. [...]according to several accounts, she subsequently used her political influence to have Prime Minister Mackenzie King ban the book's importation into Canada (Sullivan 229). Not only is he geographically peripatetic, but he moves about in his various erotic affiliations, to the extent that he is defined by his mobility and transformative capacity, a \"hermaphrodite whose love looks up through the appletree with a golden indeterminate face\" (20). Because Smart's presence in the text is similarly phantasmatic, By Grand Central Station frustrates the desire of readers who would prefer to have a stable sense of the book's referentiality Catherine Belsey contends that \"Part of the intensity of love is the desire to know the truth of the other's desire, to be certain,\" but, she says, \"paradoxically, such certainty would be the death of desire\" (37, original emphasis).