Displays

Roddy Lumsden's poems eavesdrop on a half urban, half surreal world of ladies' men and misfits, trying on roles and acting out fantasies. His second collection The Book of Love is a celebration of love in all its delightful perversity, whose characters include a randy actor, a vinegar addict and couples courting in the filing cupboard and covered with marmalade. As voyeurs sneak into one poem, naturists streak across another and there is the inevitable lurking presence of the poet's own (rich but square) alter ago. These snappy, witty poems leave tantalising echoes and reverberations that make you want to read them again and again. Now out of print in this edition, most of the poems were included in Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (2004).

Stories from classical antiquity and compelling new interpretations shed a fascinating light on Botticelli's allegorical and mythological paintings.

Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

Therese was 19 - loved by a young man she cared about, but could not desire. Carol was a sophisticated married woman, buying gifts for her daughter, when the two met in a department store. Now Therese seemed to have no other purpose than their meeting.

Substantial new readings of Chaucer's poems, offering a fresh perspective on some of the major controversies in Chaucer scholarship. Chaucer's preoccupation with love and marriage has been a focus of criticism for more than a century. Here, the love relationships and marriages in six of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Legend of Good Women are reappraised from a fresh direction, using late medieval letter collections and advice literature for women to shed new light on the competing cultures of love and marriage that troubled both Chaucer himself and hiscontemporaries. Beginning with a concise summary of the history of marriage in fourteenth-century England, and making use of recent research in social history, the volume goes on to analyse letter collections and advice books inorder to reconstruct late medieval ideology and practice. Among other elements, the author discusses the flirtatiousness of court culture, the anti-love discourse of advice literature, courtship conventions, rival models of marriage among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and the pathos of arranged marriages. Dr Cathy Hume is currently a visiting scholar at Northwestern University.

How much control do we have over love? Much less than we like to think. All that mystery, all that poetry, all those complex behaviors sur-rounding human bonding leading to the most life-changing decisions we'll ever make, are unconsciously driven by a few molecules in our brains. How does love begin? How can two strangers come to the conclusion that it would not only be pleasant to share their lives, but that theymustshare them? How can a man say he loves his wife, yet still cheat on her? Why do others stay in relationships even after the ro-mance fades? How is it possible to fall in love with the "wrong" person? How do people come to have a "type"? Physical attraction, jealousy, infidelity, mother-infant bonding-all the behaviors that so often leave us befuddled-are now being teased out of the fog of mystery thanks to today's social neuroscience. Larry Young, one of the world's leading experts in the field, and journalist Brian Alexander explain how those findings apply to you. Drawing on real human stories and research from labs around the world,The Chemistry Between Usis a bold attempt to create a "grand unified theory" of love. Some of the mind-blowing insights include- Love can get such a grip on us because it is, literally, an addiction. To a woman falling in love, a man is like her baby. Why it's false to say society makes gender, and how it's possible to have the body of one gender and the brain of another. Why some people are more likely to cheat than others. Why we sometimes truly can't resist temptation. Young and Alexander place their revelations into historical, political, and social contexts. In the pro-cess, they touch on everything from gay marriage to why single-mother households might not be good for society.The Chemistry Between Usoffers powerful in-sights into love, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and family life that will prove to be enlightening, contro-versial, and thought provoking.

In the grand tradition of the epic novel, Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago; the revolutionary, Strelnikov; and Lara, the passionate woman they both love. Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara.

The final curtain is closing on the Second World War, and Hana, a nurse, stays behind in an abandoned Italian villa to tend to her only remaining patient. Rescued by Bedouins from a burning plane, he is English, anonymous, damaged beyond recognition and haunted by his memories of passion and betrayal. The only clue Hana has to his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire – a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes describing a painful and ultimately tragic love affair.

It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.

First published as EROTIC ART IN POMPEII in 1975 by Octopus Books, the extensive historical and social background text, accompanied by 159 full colour photographs of this collection of bronzes, statues, wall paintings and everyday objects contributes to our understanding of the lifestyle and sensual philosophy of an ancient Roman people.

In this profoundly original and far-reaching study, Robert M. Polhemus shows how novels have helped to make erotic love a matter of faith in modern life. Erotic faith, Polhemus argues, is an emotional conviction--ultimately religious in nature--that meaning, value, hope, and even the possibility of transcendence can be found in love. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Polhemus shows the reciprocity of love as subject, the novel as form, and faith as motive in important works by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Throughout, Polhemus relates the novelists' representation of love to that of such artists as Botticelli, Vermeer, Claude Lorrain, Redon, and Klimt. Juxtaposing their paintings with nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts both reveals the ways in which novels develop and individualize common erotic and religious themes and illustrates how the novel has influenced our perception of all art.

Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) (born Elizabeth Fowler) was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood's literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. She wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the long 18th century as one of the important founders of the novel in English. Her writing career began in 1719 with the first two installments of Love in Excess. Many of her works were published anonymously. Amongst her other works are Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724), The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), Life's Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once. Despite the tumour-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten. Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars brilliantly explores the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love. Praise for The Fault in Our Stars: Sunday Times (Culture) 'A touching, often fiercely funny novel' The Sun on Sunday (Fabulous Magazine) 'So good I think it should be compulsory reading for everyone!' Daily Express 'John Green brilliantly captures the voices of a young generation while instilling it with the wisdom of a life that has lived too much yet will never live enough' The Metro - 2013 Best Fiction 'The love affair of two terminally ill teenagers could be mawkish. In fact, it's funny, clever, irreverent and life-affirming.' Grazia 'So good!' Good Housekeeping 'As funny as it is heartbreaking... we defy you not to fall in love with its main characters, Hazel and Augustus.' The Tablet 'A humourous and poignant love story... It's terrifically funny... as well as a moving exploration of loss and grief. And no, it's so much not just for teenage cancer sufferers... it's for everyone.' Bliss 'If you need inspiration when it comes to making the most of a moment, this one is for you' Mizz 'Insightful, bold, irreverent and raw, if this doesn't make you cry, it'll definitely make you think, laugh and maybe even fall in love yourself!'

The Historical Romance explores the ways in which romance authors seek to represent our fantasies of life in the past. Examining how the cut-and-thrust swashbucklers of the 1930s gave way to female-orientated romances, Helen Hughes takes a comprehensive look at how romance authors have dealt with the turbulent question of female independence, and how traditional attitudes towards love, marriage and women's sexuality have been approached in more recent texts. Hughes also charts the ways in which the marketing of romance has developed, with the eventual explosion of the mass market and the blockbusting family sagas of the eighties. The Historical Romance unravels the formulaic and mythical nature of historical romance to provide a fascinating study of this highly popular genre.

Tracey Emin is one of Great Britain's best-known and most controversial artists. This catalogue accompanies the first major survey exhibition of Tracey Emin's work at the Hayward Gallery in London since her rise to prominence in the 1990s. Bringing together suites of works from across the artist's career emphasising the diversity of her dynamic practice, the exhibition spotlights her achievements in a wide variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, text-based works, photographs, video and performance. The book is conceived and produced in close collaboration with the artist and designed by Graphic Thought Facility, London. The exhibition shows at Hayward Gallery, London, 18 May - 29 August 2011

Oliver Barrett IV is a rich jock from a stuffy Wasp family on his way to a Harvard degree and a career in law. Jenny Cavilleri is a wisecracking working-class beauty studying music at Radcliffe. They are opposites in nearly every way - but they fell in love. This is their story.

In this fascinating study, Anthony J. Lewis argues that it is the hero himself, rejecting a woman he apprehends as a threat, who is love's own worst enemy. Drawing upon classical and Renaissance drama, iconography, and a wide range of traditional and feminist criticism, Lewis demonstrates that in Shakespeare the actions and reactions of hero and heroine are contingent upon social setting--father-son relations, patriarchal restrictions on women, and cultural assumptions about gender-appropriate behavior. This compelling analysis shows how Shakespeare deepened the familiar love stores he inherited from New Comedy and Greek romance. Beginning with a penetrating analysis of the hero's contradictory response to sexual attraction, Lewis's discussion traces the heroine's reaction to abandonment and slander, and the lover's subsequent parallel descents into versions of bastardy and death. In arguing that comedy's happy ending is the product of the gender role reversals brought on by their evolving relationship itself, Lewis shows in meticulous detail how sexual stereotypes influence attitudes and restrict behavior. This perceptive discussion of male response to family and of female response to rejection will appeal to Shakespeare scholars and students, as well as to the theater community. Lewis's persuasive argument, that Shakespeare's heroes and heroines are, from the first, three-dimensional figures far removed from the stock types of Plautus, Terence, and his continental sources, will prove a valuable contribution to the ongoing feminist reappraisal of Shakespeare.

Mad Love has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy history and technical difficulty have prevented it from being translated into English until now.nbsp; "There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine," writes André Breton, leader of the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and '30s. Mad Love is dedicated to defying "the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the diamond, in itsnbsp;own dust." Celebrating breton's own love and lover, the book unveils the marvelous in everyday encounters and the hidden depths of ordinary things.

This book is an important study of European love poetry from Dante to Milton. It contrasts some of the ways whereby major Renaissance poets express a conflict between sensual love and spiritual love. For these poets love arouses metaphysical disquiet, throwing into relief the frailties and contradictions of human nature. The argument grows out of a close comparison of passages in Dante's Divina Comedia, and Milton's Paradise Lost. The extensive survey of conceptions of sacred and secular love is the basis for studies of other major texts: Petrarch's I Trionfi, Michelangelo's love poems, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Donne's love poetry and prose writings, Caroline lyrics, Vaughan's Silex Scintillans, and Milton's Paradise Regained. Though presenting a wide-ranging account of the evolution of ideas of love from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, the book is essentially concerned with the way in which contrasting attitudes are experienced and proved in the poetry, and contribute to each poet's distinctive understanding of love.

All the great ideals that gave life meaning in earlier societies - God, the nation, revolution, freedom, democracy - are in disarray today, questioned by many and rejected by those who have lost faith in them. But there is another value, rooted in the birth of the modern family and in the passage from traditional to modern marriage, that has transformed our lives in profound and often unrecognized ways: love. It affects not only our personal lives but many aspects of our social and collective life too, from art and education to politics. In this book Luc Ferry shows how the quiet rise of love as the central value in modern societies has created a new principle of meaning and a new definition of the good life that requires a completely different kind of philosophical thinking. It forms the basis for a new philosophy for the twenty-first century and a new kind of humanism for the modern world - not a humanism of reason and rights, but a humanism of solidarity and sympathy. The ideal that this new humanism realizes is no longer that of nationalisms and revolutions, of the perpetrating of organized violence in the name of deadly principles that are pursued over and above humanity. Rather, it is about preparing and ensuring a future for those we love most: our future generations.

With her customary accuracy, Jane Gardam reveals the extraordinariness of ordinary people as she deals with the pangs of love- fulfilled or hopeless, sexual or spiritual, tortured or hilarious- in these eleven stories. Paraded here are ladies with a 'thing' about vicars, strange events happening in ornate downstairs lavatories (and in ornate upstairs ones), and the English abroad, desperate and dotty. The glum and impossible Edna haunts the supermarket- and dispenses an unlikely kiss of life. The younger sister of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid declares her sibling 'very silly' and turns her story on its tail, an old maid forms a curious liason with a tramp, and small moments of temptation fill hotel rooms as histories glance briefly off each other.

Curated by artist and writer Chris Riddell, Poems to Live Your Life By is a beautifully illustrated collection of poems for readers young and old to carry with them as they grow. Including favorites both old and new--from selections of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets to original poems by Neil Gaiman to lyrics to an indie rock song by Phoebe Bridgers--this book is divided into different subjects and includes poems about youth, love, imaginings, and endings. Brought to life by Chris Riddell's striking artwork, Poems to Live Your Life By is the kind of book that readers can return to again and again at different moments in their life. "This curated gem gives readers an inside look into what has influenced Riddell as an artist and writer, but more than that, it is a collection of words and artwork that will hopefully provoke and inspire others." --Shelf Awareness "Engaging adolescents in ways to appreciate poetry has value, and this book has classroom applications of providing mentor texts for students' own poetry writing and artistic responses to literature." --VOYA magazine

Essays discuss theories of love, types of love, the maintenance of love relationships, marriage, and lust.

Organised around a single question: is love possible?, Brown's book provides conceptualisations of love and its possibility from sociological, philosophical and psychoanalytic viewpoints. She argues for the importance of a psychosocial understanding of love and provides a critical discussion of the philosophy and methods of Psychosocial Studies.

Romance and the Erotics of Property examines contemporary popular romance from a number of different points of view, probing for codes and subtexts that sometimes exploit and sometimes contradict its surface tale of romantic attraction, frustration, longing, and fulfillment. Cohn argues that a full understanding of the contemporary romance requires an investigation of its literary and historical sources and analogues. Three principal sources are examined in the context of women's history in bourgeois society. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Erye, and Gone With the Wind demonstrate the development of romance fiction's themes, yet in all three the central love story is complicated by issues of property, the sign of male power. Jan Cohn further considers the development of the genre n the fictions of Harriet Lewis and May Agnes Fleming, prolific and popular American romance writers of the late nineteenth century who developed the role of the villain, thereby bringing into focus the sexual and economic struggles faced by the heroine. Romance and the Erotics of Property sets romance fiction against a historic and literary background, arguing that contemporary romance disguises as tales of love the subversive fantasies of female appropriation and male property and power.

Romantic Comedy offers an introduction to the analysis of a popular but overlooked film genre. The book provides an overview of Hollywood's romantic comedy conventions, examining iconography, narrative patterns, and ideology. Chapters discuss important subgroupings within the genre: screwball sex comedy and the radical romantic comedy of the 1970s. A final chapter traces the lasting influence of these earlier forms within current romantic comedies. Films include: Pillow Talk (1959), Annie Hall (1977), and You've Got Mail (1998).

This study to analyzes romantic fiction's depiction of women as part of the broader history of ideas about women.; Given the success of the Mills & Boon romance, their portrayal of subjects like sex, love, marriage, class, motherhood and femineity are important cultural barometers and make interesting study.; The author shows how all these themes have an historical trajectory and how these novels have come to reflect feminist concerns.; Based on a study of over 1000 Mills & Boon romances the book provides analysis of plot types and shows how these have changed in response to women's own changing position within society.

In this new volume, Andrew Ashfield illustrates how women extended the horizons of Romanticism by their insistent engagement with social issues such as slavery, child labor and women workers. His previous volume, Romantic Women Poets 1770-1838, explored how women poets made important contributions to major areas of Romanticism such as landscape and seascape. Together these two volumes add new dimensions to the study of Romanticism by showing how the solitary meditation by the sea developed concurrently with major social concerns. Ashfield exposes a much more complicated relationship between the self and society than has previously prevailed in our assessments of Romanticism.

Along with writing comedic and dramatic plays, William Shakespeare was also a master poet. Using the sonnet structure (three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter), he composed 154 poems covering timeless themes of love, beauty, and mortality. The poems' subjects--the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, and the Rival Poet--have become nearly as famous as the sonnets themselves. While not the first to write poems in sonnet form, Shakespeare's sonnets are considered the most influential examples of this style. The sonnets were first published in a 1609 quarto; this is an unabridged collection of all of Shakespeare's iconic sonnets, including Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments"), and Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun").

An after-dinner walk in the moonlight leads to a series of confessions of first loves, each one sentimental and romantic. That is until Jessop takes his turn and decries the very notion of love. He tells of a tragic affair between an old school friend and an innocent Sinhalese girl, and so introduces the central motif of these three stories--the incompatibility of East and West. Based on Woolf's own experiences in Ceylon, these tales provide a brilliant depiction of colonial life. A central figure in the Bloomsbury circle, Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) is perhaps best remembered for his marriage to Virginia, yet he produced some of the finest literary writings of his age.

A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

The critically acclaimed novel about four women who learn how to carry on while leaning on each other from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back and I Almost Forgot About You. When the men in their lives prove less than reliable, Savannah, Bernadine, Gloria, and Robin find new strength through a rare and enlightening friendship as they struggle to regain stability and an identity they don't have to share with anyone. Because for the first time in a long time, their dreams are finally off hold... "Hilarious, irreverent...Reading Waiting to Exhale is like being in the company of a great friend...thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining, and very, very comforting."--Susan Isaacs, The New York Times Book Review