A Lover's Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.
Roland Barthes changed the way a generation read. A cultural commentator before his time, his careful if playful analysis of texts revolutionised the way we comprehend cultural products. Both critic and literary essayist, his writings continue to provoke. His best known work includes Mythologies, Camera Lucida, Image-Music-Text, The Empire of Signs, A Lover's Discourse, Writing Degree Zero, S/Z and The Fashion System.
Translated by Andy Stafford, Senior Lecturer in French Studies, University of Leeds and edited by Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Sydney.
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society.
Richard Howard teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, USA. He has also translated works by Barthes, Foucault and Todorov.
Wayne Koestenbaum isa Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. His many books span poetry, essay collections, biography, and fiction; he is also an accomplished playwright and the librettist for the opera adaptation of his book
Jackie Under My Skin. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His essays and poems have been published in
The New Yorker,
The Paris Review,
London Review of Books, and many other publications. A widely shown painter, he released his first album of piano and voice in 2017. He lives in New York.