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In the remote highlands of the country of Georgia, a small group of mountaindwellers called the Khevsurs used to express sexuality and romance in ways that appear to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, their practices were romantic, but could never lead to marriage. On the other hand, they were sexual, but didn't correspond to what North Americans, or most Georgians, would have called sex. These practices were well documented by early ethnographers before they disappeared completely by the midtwentieth century, and have become a Georgian obsession. In this fascinating book, Manning recreates the story of how these private, secretive practices became a matter of national interest, concern, and fantasy. Looking at personal expressions of love and the circulation of these narratives at the broader public level of the modern nation, Love Stories offers an ethnography of language and desire that doubles as an introduction to key linguistic genres and to the interplay of language and culture.

Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-defi nition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly reconquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of “strangers” of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the “strange land” of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.