Abstract

Perhaps because love is a feeling rather than a thought, there is a serious shortage of thinking on love available for the increasing number of students studying on courses devoted to the subject. This volume aims to address this lack, providing a much-needed resource that will support and enliven research across a wide range of disciplines. The essays collected here have been contributed by both established and emerging international scholars in the field, and are drawn from a variety of subject areas including continental philosophy, ethics, critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, post-colonial theory, literary theory and personal memoir. Addressing a varied but overlapping set of concerns that speak of desire, friendship, obsession, destructiveness, sympathy and loss, the writers here bring a shared commitment to the theme of love in the face of its denial and destruction in so many quarters so much of the time. In such 'dark times', it is work such as this that, perhaps, can restore our faith in the power of thinking. This volume will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers in the field, but, most of all, is intended for all readers, whether specialist or non-specialist, who wish to give some serious thought to the most human of human feelings: love.