A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century - Softcover

Nehring, Cristina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060765046 ISBN 13: 9780060765040

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

In the twenty-first century, political correctness, cynicism, prag-matism, and the commodification of sex have reduced romantic love to a discredited myth or a recreational sport—"a cause for embarrassment," says Cristina Nehring. In A Vindication of Love, Nehring wrests romantic love from the clutches of retrograde feminists and cutting-edge capitalists, thrill-seeking convenience shoppers and safe-sex moralists. With help from lovers ranging from Heloise and Abelard to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Nehring celebrates the wild, irreverent, and uncompromising models of love we have inherited—as she rediscovers romantic love's fearless and heroic provenance, and challenges readers to demand partnerships that fully engage body, heart, and mind.

About this title

About the Author:

A highly acclaimed and consistently provocative essayist and critic, Cristina Nehring has written for Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, CondÉ Nast Traveler, New York magazine, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books. She has won numerous awards and holds a Ph.D. in literature from UCLA.  She lives with her infant daughter in Paris, Los Angeles, and Chania, Greece.

From Publishers Weekly:

Nehring's opening assertion that she argues by provocation and aims to anger reveals the rhetorical nature of her argument that our tepid age needs a return to true Eros. Just what she advocates is unclear, since her examples range from the chaste passion of Emily Dickinson through the frenzied sexuality of Edna St. Vincent Millay to the open relationship of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nehring does regret the collateral damage of this last pairing (a couple of cases of insanity and one suicide among their other lovers) and acknowledges that most of her case studies demonstrate excesses not to be emulated. That reduces her call for boldness in love to familiar clichés: absence makes the heart grow fonder; play hard to get; and defy social conventions in love (what is more of a postmodern cliché than advocating transgression ?). Nehring, who has written for Harper's and the Atlantic among others, is a keen, empathic reader of literary texts, drawing attention to undervalued love writings like the letters of Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand, and offering an astute reading of Dickinson's much-debated Master letters. But overall, she is more preachy and patronizing than provocative. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0060765046
• ISBN 13: 9780060765040
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352