In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal. In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities.

In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal. In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Luisa Passerini

PART I: HISTORICIZING LOVE: POINTS DE REPÈRE/ POINTS OF REFERENCE

Chapter 1. Love and Religion: Comparative Comments
Jack Goody

Chapter 2. The Rule of Love: The History of Western Romantic Love in Comparative Perspective
William M. Reddy

Chapter 3. Love of State – Affection for Authority: Politics of Mass Participation in Twentieth Century European Contexts
Alf Lüdtke

Chapter 4. Overseas Europeans: Whiteness and the Impossible Colonial Romance in Interwar Italy
Liliana Ellena

Chapter 5. 'Window to Europe': Social and Cinematic Phantasms of the Post-Soviet Subject
Almira Ousmanova

PART II: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LOVES

Chapter 6. Love in the Time of Revolution: The Polish Poets of Café Ziemiańska
Marci Shore

Chapter 7. Love, Marriage and Divorce: American and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII
Alexis Schwarzenbach

Chapter 8. 'Dear Adolf!': Locating Love in Nazi Germany
Alexander C.T. Geppert

Chapter 9. Love, Again: Crisis and the Search for Consolation. The 'Revista de Occidente' and the Creation of a Culture, 1923-1936
Alison Sinclair

Chapter 10. Political Readings of Don Juan and Romantic Love in Spain from the 1920s to the 1940s
Jo Labanyi

PART III: EUROPEAN BORDERS AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN LOVE RELATIONS

Chapter 11. Between Europe and the Atlantic: The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism Margarida
Calafate Ribeiro

Chapter 12. The 'Volkskörper' in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic
Sandra Mass

Chapter 13. Anica Savić Rebac, Olga Freidenberg, Edith Stein: Love in the Time of War
Svetlana Slapšak

Chapter 14. Secular Couplings: An Intergenerational Affair with Islam
Ruth Mas

Notes on Contributors
Index