This book tries to draft a historical
route through Western Literature (particularly European, from Middle Ages to
Stendhal) focusing the matter of love. Is such a trail a journey to glory, or a
descent down to failure? The author leans heavily toward the second hypothesis.
By failure we mean a progressive lowering of love sublimity, a gradual loss of
sense, an opaque rising dullness. The unlucky love has been the glory of
passion for Courtly and Petrarchan ages. But the desacralization of love will
be the actual destiny of this culture, in diffraction and delusion. Even the
adulterous liaison, tragic and sublime to the full extent in Paolo and
Francesca or Tristan und Isolde, becomes boring, worthless and indecisive in
novels by Constant or, later, Eça de Queiros. This essay deepens some of the
countless ways in which love fails in Western tradition.
Author(s) Details
Roberto Gigliucci
Sapienza University of Rome,
Piazzale (Square) Aldo Moro, 5, Rome 00185, Italy.
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