The Routledge History of Love in World Literature and Culture

The Routledge History of Love in World Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging, global rethinking of romantic love.Bringing together scholars from across continents and disciplines, the volume shows how love is imagined, practiced, and contested in different cultural, historical, and political contexts, challenging the idea that love follows a single, universal script. The collection examines representations of eros across Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and the Americas, spanning medieval texts to contemporary novels, film, television, visual art, and theatre.Well-known case studies include So Long a Letter, The God of Small Things, The Arabian Nights, The Forty Rules of Love, as well as works by Olive Schreiner, Gabriel García Márquez, Louise Erdrich, and modern Chinese and Japanese fiction.Rather than treating love as timeless or purely personal, contributors show how it is shaped by gender, religion, colonial histories, nationalism, technology, ecology,