Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis

David Shumway

Published by New York University Press 2003

Modern Love

Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis

David Shumway

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814783535.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

“My ideas of romance came from the movies,” said Woody Allen, and it is to the movies—as well as to novels, advice columns, and self-help books—that David Shumway turns for his history of modern love.
Modern Love argues that a crisis in the meaning and experience of marriage emerged when it lost its institutional function of controlling the distribution of property, and instead came to be seen as a locus for feelings of desire, togetherness, and loss. Over the course of the twentieth century, partly in response to this crisis, a new language of love—“intimacy”—emerged, not so much replacing but rather coexisting with the earlier language of “romance.”
Reading a wide range of texts, from early twentieth-century advice columns and their late twentieth-century antecedent, the relationship self-help book, to Hollywood screwball comedies, and from the “relationship films” of Woody Allen and his successors to contemporary realist novels about marriages, Shumway argues that the kinds of stories the culture has told itself have changed. Part layperson’s history of marriage and romance, part meditation on intimacy itself, Modern Love will be both amusing and interesting to almost anyone who thinks about relationships (and who doesn’t?).

Author / Editor information

Shumway David :

David Shumway is Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of Michel Foucault, among others.

Reviews

Fascinating and timely.

Elizabeth Freeman,author of The Wedding Complex:
An extremely valuable contribution to the history of that supposedly timeless ideal, the intimate relationship.

James Naremore,Indiana University:
A wide-ranging and beautifully dialectical analysis of the modern discourses on love and intimacy. David Shumway overturns some of the usual assumptions about romantic love and, in the process makes original, often surprising observations about literature, movies, pop music, self-help books, and a variety of other texts. Modern Love is a pleasure to read, and it contributes significantly to our understanding of modernity.

A cultural study of love and marriage in fiction and film rather than a history of recent marriage, Modern Love illuminates the complexities of an important recent development in American marital ideals.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: A Brief History of Love Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I Romance
1 Romance in the Romance and the Novel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
2 Romancing Marriage: Advice Books and the Crisis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
3 Marriage as Adultery: Hollywood Romance and the Screwball Comedy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
4 Power Struggles: Casablanca and Gone with the Wind Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
II Intimacy
5 Talking Cures: The Discourse of Intimacy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
6 Relationship Stories Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
7 Marriage Fiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
Conclusion: Other Media, Other Discourses: The Crisis Continues Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: August 1, 2003
ISBN: 9780814783535