Where Love Happens

*Where does love happen?* Grounding love's big questions in the realm of the concrete, this anthology addresses the profound complexity of love in the long nineteenth century and the changing social practices it brought about. Through hitherto under-researched aspects and aesthetics of love, leading scholars show new prisms of love's spaces.

Some decades ago, Jean-Luc Nancy asked, 'Has not everything been said on the subject of love? Could we perhaps be exhausted?' The question is a pertinent one; why devote yet another book to the subject? Grounding love in the realm of the concrete by querying, where does love happen?, the essays address hitherto under-researched aspects and aesthetics of love, like the love of the child, same-sex love, love of country, love for machines, controversial relationships, love of the dead, love of the past, and networks of relationships revolving around love and intimacy. Here, leading scholars suggest that changing social practices, developed in the course of the long nineteenth century, determined new spaces and places for love to happen, to unfold, develop and break up. Thereby, the much-debated claim that romantic love is an invention of European Romanticism is challenged, asking if romantic love might not be less and other kinds of love far more romantic than at first imagined.

Autorentext

Helene Grøn holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow and is currently a Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. **

Lene Østermark-Johansen** is Professor of English literature and art at the University of Copenhagen.

Viktoria de Rijke is Professor in Arts & Education at Middlesex University in London.

Inhalt

Contents - List of Figures - Acknowledgements - Introduction Helene Grøn, Lene Østermark-Johansen and Viktoria de Rijke - RELATIONSHIPS AT THE MARGINS: LOVE AS ALIBI - Reading with the Heart: Tracing Love and Human Rights across Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) and Mary Louise Gordon's Chase of the Wild Goose (1936) Helene Grøn -The Homosexual World of Love and Ritual: Love and Painting in Britain, 1860-1920 Michael Hatt - Fairy Tale Love: Little Red Riding Hood and Photography, 1820-1920 Viktoria de Rijke - Corners of Love and Death: Probing into a Modern Obsession James Hall - RECONNECTING LOVE: THRESHOLDS OF COMMUNICATION - Owd Friends: Victorian Working-Class Poetry and the Love of Things Kirstie Blair - 'There Is No Death': Familial Love, Loss, and (Re)connection in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist Literature Emily Vincent - From the Linden Trees to the Willows: Female Mourners of Goethe's Werther in Eighteenth-Century England Lene Østermark-Johansen - Intimate Communication: Romantic Love as a Social Practice in Bettina von Arnim's Clemens Brentano's Frühlingskranz and Die Günderode Alexander Knopf - LOVE ILLUMINATED: TRANSFORMING 'COLD PHILOSOPHY' - Fairy Lights: Light and a Changing Paradigm of Love at the End of the Nineteenth Century Joanna Beaufoy - 'Wherefore Flout / the Silent Blessing Fate': Love, Fate and Metaphysics in John Keats and His Legacy James Dowthwaite - Teleoaffectivity: Love in Casa Guidi Windows Jerome Wynter - Coda Helene Grøn, Lene Østermark-Johansen and Viktoria de Rijke - Notes on Contributors - Index