Poetics of Tenderness: On Falling in Love

The Poetics of Tenderness is a literary-critical essay on love that argues that sexual love is not merely an artifact or "invention" of culture, but a vital manifestation of the culture-making power itself. It calls upon various authors to turn the discussion of sexuality around and substitute older and more durable associations of sex and love with care, affection, beauty, memory, worthiness, and ideality. Close readings of two widely read novels, Dickens Great Expectations and Nabokovs Lolita, explore these authors' distinct accounts of love's unfolding in particular social, cultural, historical, and psychological settings, inspiring narrators to inquire into an all-consuming preoccupation that restores them to the moral order.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 330 pages
\n Publication date: 13 December 2017
\n Publisher: Lexington Books
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The Poetics of Tenderness is a literary-critical essay on love, grounded in the developmental theory of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and shaped by recent work on the neurobiology and anthropology of love. It maintains that sexual love is not merely an artifact or "invention" of culture, but a vital manifestation of the culture-making power itself. Calling upon Andreus Capellanus, Plato, Schopenhauer, Freud, William James, Hardy, Dreiser, and Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, and Tom Stoppard, among others, the book aims to turn the discussion of sexuality around—to substitute for ideas and figures of violence and predation which have dominated our sexual imaginary for more than four decades much older and more durable associations of sex and love with care, affection, beauty, memory, worthiness, and ideality. It argues for a resurrection of tenderness, and holds out the possibility that even where anything goes, love may yet be a source of sweetness and light, that mutual respect, equity, justice, and decency in the spheres of sex and love will more likely flow from compassion and sympathy than from anger, fear, suspicion, mistrust, resentment, and bitterness. Close readings of two widely read novels, Dickens' Great Expectations and Nabokov's Lolita, preside over the discussion, exploring these authors' distinctively detailed and probing accounts of loves unfolding in particular social, cultural, historical, and psychological settings. Both novels proceed from deep within the authors' interior life; both novels release love from its normally deep entanglements with intimacy and isolation, compatibility and incompatibility, social place and social possibility, inspiring in their narrators a prolonged introspective inquiry into an all-consuming preoccupation which ultimately restores them to wholeness.

\n Weight: 650g\n
Dimension: 161 x 237 x 32 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781498548335\n \n