How the French invented love
Subtitle: nine hundred years of passion and romance
By: Marilyn Yalom
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780062048318
Subjects: Social life and customs; French National characteristics; Love; History and criticism; French literature; Man-woman relationships; Love in literature; Moral conditions; Sex in literature; Sex customs; History
Description: Acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom distills the central tenets of the Gallic gospel of love from her reading of the great French literary works, as well as from the people she has known and her own memories of France, examining almost a thousand years of divine culture in search of the intimate moments that reveal how the particularly French concept of l'amour has endured and evolved.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [381]-390) and index.
Table of contents: title: Abélard and Héloïse, patron saints of French lovers; title: Courtly love : how the French invented romance; title: Gallant love : La Princesse de Clèves; title: Comic love, tragic love : Molière and Racine; title: Seduction and sentiment : Prévost, Crébillon fils, Rousseau, and Laclos; title: Love letters : Julie de Lespinasse; title: Republican love : Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland; title: Yearning for the mother : Constant, Stendahl, and Balzac; title: Love among the Romantics : George Sand and Alfred de Musset; title: Romantic love deflated : Madame Bovary; title: Love in the Gay Nineties : Cyrano de Bergerac; title: Love between men : Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, and Gide; title: Desire and despair : Proust's neurotic lovers; title: Lesbian love : Colette, Gertrude Stein, and Violette Leduc; title: Existentialists in love : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre; title: The dominion of desire : Marguerite Duras; title: Love in the twenty-first century.