Unmaking Love : : The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union / / Ashley Shelden.

The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of love-it explodes it, queers it, and makes it unrecognizable. Rather than providing union, connection, and completion, love in contemporary fiction destroys the possibility of unity, harbors negativity, and foregrounds difference. Compari...

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Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2017
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Place / Publishing House:New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2017]
©2017
Year of Publication:2017
Language:English
Series:Literature Now
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource (200 p.)
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Other title:Frontmatter --
Contents --
Acknowledgments --
Introduction: Unmaking Love --
1. Lesbian Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood --
2. The Ends of Love: Amorous Redemption, the Passion for Negativity, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy --
3. Amorous Time: Nostalgia, Temporality, and the Pursuit of Optimism in Alan Hollinghurst's Th e Line of Beauty --
4. Cosmopolitan Love: Encountering Difference in Hari Kunzru's Transmission and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled --
Conclusion: Otherness, Cloud Atlas , and Contemporary Literature --
Notes --
Bibliography --
Index
Summary:The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of love-it explodes it, queers it, and makes it unrecognizable. Rather than providing union, connection, and completion, love in contemporary fiction destroys the possibility of unity, harbors negativity, and foregrounds difference. Comparing contemporary and modernist depictions of love to delineate critical continuities and innovations, Unmaking Love locates queerness in the novelistic strategies of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hari Kunzru. In their work, "queer love" becomes more than shorthand for sexual identity. It comes to embody thwarted expectations, disarticulated organization, and unnerving multiplicity. In queer love, social forms are deformed, affective bonds do not bind, and social structures threaten to come undone. Unmaking Love draws on psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies to read love's role in contemporary literature and its relation to queer negativity.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780231543156
9783110543308
9783110540550
9783110625264
9783110548198
DOI:10.7312/shel17822
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Ashley Shelden.