Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe
From Eurydice to Laura and beyond, dead lovers call forth powerful expressions of grief, sorrow, love, and longing. They occasion mourning and other rituals and seem to be intrinsically bound up with changing ideas of subjecthood itself. Dead Lovers explores the complex attachments to the figure of the dead lover in Western literature, art, and other forms of cultural expression from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. \ \ By...
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From Eurydice to Laura and beyond, dead lovers call forth powerful expressions of grief, sorrow, love, and longing. They occasion mourning and other rituals and seem to be intrinsically bound up with changing ideas of subjecthood itself. Dead Lovers explores the complex attachments to the figure of the dead lover in Western literature, art, and other forms of cultural expression from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. By reflecting on the study of dead lovers, these essays also trace the development of themes and claims relating to our own investment in a “dead” but eroticized past that we seek to recover. The collection offers a sustained discussion of how scholarly interest in the representation of loss and erotic bonds raises pressing questions about nostalgia, performance, the role of affect in intellectual work, and the gendered cultural values that script the description and experience of the erotic. In its focus on loss as a site of affect and imagination, Dead Lovers offers an original and provocative contribution to the history of scholarship. Basil Dufallo is Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.Peggy McCracken is Professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.
Introduction Basil Dufallo Peggy McCracken 1The Best Lover David M. Halperin 8Propertius and the Blindness of Affec Basil Dufallo 22Wilfred Owen's Adonis J. D. Reed 39Embracing the Corpse: Necrophilic Tendencies in Petrarch Alison Cornish 57Orpheus after Eurydice: (According to Albrecht Durer) Helmut Puff 71Dead Letters Catherine Brown 96"Until Death Do Us Part?": The Flesh and Bones of Politics in Early Modern Spain Samuel Sanchez y Sanchez 106Dead Children: Ben Jonson's Epitaph "On My First Sonne" Silke-Maria Weineck 128"Give Sorrow Words": Emotional Loss and the Articulation of Temperament in Early Modern England Michael Schoenfeldt 143Contributors 165Index 169
