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This paper argues that there are important irrational elements to love. In the philosophical literature, we typically find that love is either thought of as rational or arational and that any irrational elements are thought to be defective, or extraneous to love itself. We argue, on the contrary, that irrationality is in part connected to what we find valuable about love. We focus on 3 basic elements of love: 1) Whom you love 2) How much you love them 3) How much of a role love plays in your life And in each case, we argue that love can be irrational and valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jane Austen is an excellent female writer in the United Kingdom. Many of her works appeal to generation after generation of readers. She wrote and published six novels in total. Sense and Sensibility was one of her popular novels and first named as Elinor and Marianne. Elder sister Elinor is a rational girl who can control her temper appropriately. She loves Edward very much. However, the younger sister Marianne is very emotional. She pursues romantic love and fails to control her temper after the lovelorn. After experiencing many setbacks, Marianne understands many principles and corrects her childish viewpoints. Luckily, both of them get their true love finally. By researching original book and other literatures as well as analyzing the shift of Marianne's behaviors and views on marriage from sensibility to sense, we can understand wise attitudes towards marriage. That is to say, when a woman chooses her Mr. Right, she should be more rational in love. This paper has great guiding importance for current women to seek their guidance in love. The paper will lead us to find what the rational views on marriage are and what we should do in marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Louisa May Alcott, in her 1873 short story, "Anna's Whim," invokes a particular concept of love and conjugal bliss to express her stance on the relation between the sexes in direct response to ongoing discussions about the woman question and the role of education in her time. Alcott positions herself on these subjects by invoking a variety of authors and texts and then providing her own fictional response to them. Intriguingly, she situates her discourse on love, gender relations, and women's education intertextually within a broader transatlantic discussion of nineteenth-century notions of woman's proper sphere of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ostensibly a narrative of the performing ofBillets-Doux—a project involving the anonymous secretion of love-notes into library books—and illustrated with images of Ellen Bell’s practice, Bell’s paper will explore notions of books as material objects and private containers of closeness, public libraries as sites for performing intimacy and the artist as anonymous gift-giver. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present paper is about the long multicultural inheritance of the oral narrative, its multiple origins and use in the modern narrative. Orality need not necessarily be placed in an historical context as its moral value long survives its original context. The significant thing is the presence of the listener/s, which serves as a congregation and almost a ceremonial presence of the narrator. The tradition of oral narratives has travelled across time and space and religious and secular discourses. Omair Ahmad's The Storyteller's Tale locates the narrative in mid-eighteenth century, a narrative with historical context on destruction and dislocation. Against this there are nearly half a dozen male and three women narrators. Each narrative reveals a tale of trust and betrayal, love and revenge, power and ambition. Often repetitive in their narratives, the idea of difference within repletion is fully explored as an engrossing and meaningful discourse unfolds itself, both admirable and tragic in its impact. The strength of narrativity and meaning is wrapped up in its orality leaving the reader/listener sharing the powerful emotions. Several different locales are used: war, woods, small kingdoms, urban scapes, etc as the narrative travels from Delhi to Awadh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three stories in Tarchetti’s Amore nell’arte as case studies of the conjunction of art, love, and death, which plays a central role in the decadent imagination. In advancing the idea that art is superior to life, these texts couple the artistic ideal with a propensity toward necrophilic excess of love. Departing from the critical tendency to view such excess as evidence of an anticonventional stance, I explore how Tarchetti’s writing points to complicity between unfettered ideals and worldly power structures. I rely on an ecocritical perspective to trace this complicity to a necro logic: a hollowed out, life-denying symbolic order that posits abstract, polarizing distinctions between self and other in order to enable limitless self-expansion at the expense of the other. The paper’s central argument can be summed up as follows: the path to self-fulfillment emplotted in Tarchetti’s stories shows deathly implications in the creative vitality of decadent literature by leading from idealistic love, through necrophilicamore nell’arte, to ultimate self-destruction. At the root of this outcome lies a tendency to devalue life processes and overvalue pure abstractions — a tendency ultimately consistent with the conventional ethos that the misfit Scapigliati and other decadent writers ostensibly rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To redraw the boundaries of what love, desire, and romance mean in the context of postcolonial and transnational writing, this article will use arguments by Anne Carson, Catherine Belsey, and others who regard love as inherently transformative, as the springboard for my discussion of Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie's novel Americanah (2013). The notion that love functions as a productive interruption of norms can be applied to three aspects of the novel: space, body, and text. The construction of a specific transnational space for the two protagonists of Americanah is marked by geographical travel and emotional border crossing. Accordingly, the first part of the paper will analyse how the lovers fashion their respective spaces of home and belonging, both in Africa and the diaspora. The second part of my analysis will focus on the bodily encounters Ifemelu and Obinze experience, and how intimate sexual acts of love may break down previously erected barriers. The third part of this paper will examine the textuality and language of Americanah's love story and how its romantic trajectory ultimately escapes its conventional boundaries - geographically, digitally, and meta-textually. In connecting love with spatiality, corporeality, and textuality in Adichie's novel, I acknowledge the different affects and effects of love and what it does - as material practice, as embodied experience, and as a discursive and textual construct. Writing a love story against oppression and against restrictive orders, Americanah engages in an empowering act of giving voice to the formerly silenced, of providing wiggle spaces for alternative identity constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There can't be a more universal and complicated emotion than love. The stock theme of a female-centric love-triangle yields to writers a great opportunity for exploring this complication. The cultural dichotomy between the East and West placing the 'woman' in different footing makes a very interesting comparative study of her role in a love relationship as depicted in their representative bodies of literature. Limiting the scope of the paper to the complicated nature of a triangular love-affair in some of the modern Bengali and other texts, the paper offers some insights into the reasons why the European lady-loves are more vitalistic, active and decisive than their Indian counterparts like Bimala, Padmini or Maloty. Of multiple motivations behind the woman's stance in the triangles are love, lust, money, societal approval, politics domination and many others, and the final decision often is guided by the complex interaction among all these. The self-assured Shavian stance of the central woman assigning her the decision-making role is mostly missing in the Indian love-triangles. The cultural hegemony of women's sexual inhibition as a different mode of male domination regulates the psyche and sexual behavior of the Indian women--irrespective of their class, education, breeding and sense of morality--brand feminine sensuality as 'evil'. Any serious insight into the biological facts or power politics is forbidden. The paper after examining the complexities of different love-triangles comes to the conclusion that female sensuality is no evil, but the evilness is a construct of the male-dominated culture both in the East and West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solitude and a striving to communicate are major themes in the poetry of Walter de la Mare. While best known for his verse and fiction, de la Mare also produced a series of unconventional anthological works which contain explicit treatments of those themes which are only implicit in his creative work. Drawing on the insights found in these anthologies, this paper argues that, for de la Mare, solitude - along with its opposite state, connectedness - form the endpoints of an axis of concern that is present throughout his body of work. His poetry can be read as an exploration of the infinitely varying degrees of solitude and connection that exist between these two absolute states, manifesting as the possibility of communication held indefinitely in abeyance. Furthermore, in a critical essay on the discourse of love, contained in his 1943 anthological work Love, de la Mare links the themes of solitude, connectedness, and the attendant possibilities of communication, to his deep concern with the problems of language. In doing so, he foreshadows the work of later critics concerning absence and presence in literature, and the possibility of language and meaning in the absence of an addressee, doing so at a time when much of the critical consensus took the communicative efficacy of language for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines various forms of time as they’re marked and experienced in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902). Time might be most of the essence for the ill Milly Theale, but James shows that discrete increments of time play a particularly prominent role in constituting the consciousness of Merton Densher. In turn, it is precisely for his access to a divisible, measurable “specious present”—unique in the scheme of the book—that the journalist comes to be valued by others. Ultimately, then, the novel describes a kind of corruptive economy of “buying” and “saving” time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (1939) and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936) explore doomed love within the context or against a background of war. Both texts are vibrant critiques of war and therefore militant in their pacifism. Whether explicit or implicit, these modernist writers' refusal to endorse war counters traditional war narratives; harboring an unfulfilled love, the narratives assert a female viewpoint pitted against a male one, whether rejecting traditional gender roles or blurring gender boundaries. This paper examines the interconnection of love and war within the complex dynamics of history, memory and trauma woven within the narratives as Porter and Barnes engage in gender politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definition of love given by Descartes in thePassions of the Soul(art. 79–84) has never stopped puzzling commentators. If the first Cartesian textbooks discreetly evoke or even fail to discuss Descartes’s account of love, Spinoza harshly criticizes it, pointing out that it is ‘on all hands admitted to be very obscure’. More recently several scholars have noticed the puzzling (or even paradoxical) character of the articles of thePassions of the Soulon love and hate. In this paper, I would like to propose a reassessment of the definition of love provided by thePassions of the Souland theLettersto Elisabeth and Chanut. By tracing back Descartes’s scholastic sources (namely Aquinas’s treatises on the passions and charity in theSumma Theologiae), I will demonstrate how Descartes builds up his definition of love by displacing or subverting the meaning of several major elements of the thomisticvulgataon love. Hence, a significant part of the obscurity of the definition given by thePassions of the Soulpossibly finds its ultimate rationale in this attempt to recover some traditional questions of the scholastic debate on love, while advancing new answers to them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simone de Beauvoir was a French author and an existentialist. In 1949 a book titled The Second Sex was published in which the author, Beauvoir, discussed in length about women's precarious position in society throughout history and in her times. She took the discussion on women's liberty and sexuality forward in her treatise Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome which she wrote for an American men's magazine, Esquire, in 1959. Traces of The Second Sex were conspicuous in the essay whose subject was the rising starlet of French cinema Brigitte Bardot and the sexual, carefree image she projected on the silver screen. Bardot's turn as an object of desire for men in And God Created Woman (1956) coupled with a devil-may-care attitude, made Beauvoir curious to say the least. The term Lolita in the catchphrase 'Lolita Syndrome' comes from Vladimir Nabokov's genre making novel Lolita (1955), which deals with the risqué topic of an adult man in love with a 12 year old girl. The essay in focus here is a unique combination of feminist outlook, cinematic discourse, and literary credentials. The following paper is an attempt to revisit the essay from the point of view of contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of the play "Love! Valour! Compassion!" by Terrence McNally. Particular focus is given the role of unconditional love in the play and in the works and personal papers of writer John Cheever. Details on McNally's teleplay adaptation of Cheever's short story "The Five-Forty-Eight" are presented. McNally's screenplay "Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune" is also discussed.

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In this paper, the author contests Helmut de Boor's widespread labelling of the early Minnesang verses as the ›Danubian tradition‹ by revealing his unfortunate blending of topographical, textual, formal and genre-related aspects. The argument is based on a selection of early stanzas that have not absorbed Franco-Provençal influences such as the strophic form of the canzone or the idea of love service. In the manuscript tradition, some of these in the first place anonymous verses have been attributed to Der von Kürenberg, the Burggraf von Regensburg, Leutholt von Seven, Waltram von Gresten and Niune. At this point they are newly conceptualized as witnesses of a collective art form. Therefore, these early verses constitute an own sub-genre and can be distinguished from the later corpora rightly attributed to the Burggraf von Rietenburg, Meinloh von Sevelingen and Dietmar von Aist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier offers an imaginative and philosophically intriguing twist on the familiar trope of the irreconcilable tension between a man's love for a woman and his duties to his wife and family. In West's hands this theme becomes a mere framing device for a deeper conflict, one in which the need for happiness is set against the prerogatives of truth, the whim of fantasy against the realm of public facts. In this paper I discuss these themes in the light of recent philosophical discussions of the nature and value of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wang Tao (1828-97) was a late Qing translator, political commentator, and fiction writer who spent time in England, France and Scotland, and served as an important literary link between China and the West. In examining Wang's tales of Sino-Western encounters and drawing from the long literary tradition of depicting foreign "Others," this paper shows that Wang's image of the West in his literary tales is ambivalent. Further, it argues that Wang's gender positioning of the Chinese "Self" and Western "Other" is rather ambiguous. By interpreting his representation of the West against his immediate historical context (e.g., a China facing unprecedented political and cultural challenges), this study investigates Wang's use of various rhetorical strategies from an existing discourse on foreign "Others" (particularly the theme of "foreign woman marrying Chinese man") to appropriate, domesticate and even contain the West. It also shows how Wang complicates and even subverts these older rhetorical strategies as a way to cope with the new historical reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their artistic and generational differences, Louisa May Alcott and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman subscribe to the new, revivalist evangelical, understanding of marital love in their critique of the Puritan view of love and marriage. In A Marble Woman (1865) and Work: A Story of Experience (1873), Alcott defines love as an involuntary attraction and sees it as the only reason for marriage. In Pembroke (1894) and the early short fiction, her younger New England compatriot, Freeman, echoes the idea that it is better to remain a metaphorical nun than marry for any other reason but mystical love. In an absence of a God-given mate, female protagonists transform their love to compassionate care. On the other hand, in the texts of both writers, most male characters battle the vestiges of Puritan will before succumbing to the unguarded expression of romantic love, usually in dramatic conversion-like transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl (1869) promotes conventional gender expectations and traditional values, at the same time it depicts heterosexual marriage as mercenary and dispassionate. It proposes women's choice to become self-sustaining as a positive alternative to marriage. Thus, the narrative seems to destabilize the same conventionality it promotes: "spinsterhood," independent career women, and same-gender affection all appear in a positive light. Beyond Alcott's conventional plot, the book proposes some progressive, provocative, and ambiguous scenarios the unveiling of which requires the readers' collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers insight on the unhappy ending in fairy tales during the 17th century. Topics discussed include the association of love disappearance with the conventional happy ending of fairy tales, the contemporary politics of both marriage and love, and the attribution of the disappearance of love to separation, disappointment or death.

Among Shakespeare's plays revolving around the theme of love, Anthony and Cleopatra and The Taming of the Shrew develop an un-romanticized attitude by focusing on carnal realities, reinforced through the imagery associated with Cleopatra and Katherine as well as the banquet occasions. In these two plays, the theme of love acquires a carnivalesque approach through which debasement is experienced as a part of love rapports. This paper discusses grotesque representations of love and feasting in the plays by employing relevant viewpoints of the 'grotesque,' mainly those theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin. Accordingly, Bakhtinian idea of 'grotesque realism' and carnival as well as the concept of degradation related to bodily life are highlighted in their association with carnal realities as portrayed in the selected works. The aim of the study is to demonstrate how the theme of love is un-romanticized through the idea of grotesque. Furthermore, since Bakhtinian analysis targets the comic and regenerative in the grotesque, the elaborate choice of a comedy and a tragedy for this study is assumed to be an illuminating endeavor. Grotesque and its implicative denotation revolve around the concept of language and the discourse carried out by the intention of the characters. The elaboration of linguistic discourse in this study goes along with love ideology in a dramatic text. Thus, Bakhtin's conceptualization of grotesque facilitates the dramatic orientation of love in Anthony and Cleopatra and The Taming of the Shrew, whereby the theme of love gets un-romanticized in these plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the silent film director Mauritz Stiller (1883-1928), renowned for having discovered Greta Garbo and for fashioning her into one of the most famous screen icons of all time, served as a model for the eponymous hero of Max Frisch's Stiller. The reputedly odd, symbiotic relationship between Garbo and her mentor, who were dubbed by friends 'Pygmalion and Galatea,' parallels on a number of levels the obvious Pygmalion-Galatea relation between the sculptor Stiller and his beautiful wife and model, the ballerina Julika Stiller-Tschudy. Seen in this light, the 'feminine mystique' with which Frisch imbues his fictive diva is not only a purposeful allusion to his own film idol, but also a complex representation of man's creation of woman into the fundamentally inaccessible object of his idealized love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines uses made of Viola's 'She never told her love' speech from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in the eighteenth century. Starting with its ubiquity in the period's anthology literature, it turns to the more exploratory appropriations made by Samuel Richardson, Teresia Constantia Phillips, and William Blake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]