Unmaking Love
- Authors
- Shelden, Ashley T.
- Publisher
- Columbia University Press
- Tags
- literary criticism , modern , 21st century , shel17822 , 20th century , lit024060 , lit024050
- ISBN
- 9780231178228
- Date
- 2017
- Size
- 0.73 MB
- Lang
- en
The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of loveit 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...
Ashley T. Shelden is associate professor of English at Kennesaw State University.
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.
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. "Unmaking Love" explores the novelistic strategies that Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hari Kunzru have used to fracture the ideal of romantic fusion. Working within the emergent field of love studies, "Unmaking Love" draws on cutting-edge theories in psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies to read love's role in contemporary literature and its relation to queer negativity. It also compares modern-day and modernist depictions of love to delineate critical continuities and innovations.