The Routledge History of Love in World Literature and Culture

The Routledge History of Love in World Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging, global rethinking of romantic love. Bringing together scholars from across continents and disciplines, the volume shows how love is imagined, practiced, and contested in different cultural, historical, and political contexts, challenging the idea that love follows a single, universal script.

The collection examines representations of eros across Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and the Americas, spanning medieval texts to contemporary novels, film, television, visual art, and theatre. Well-known case studies include So Long a Letter, The God of Small Things, The Arabian Nights, The Forty Rules of Love, as well as works by Olive Schreiner, Gabriel García Márquez, Louise Erdrich, and modern Chinese and Japanese fiction. Rather than treating love as timeless or purely personal, contributors show how it is shaped by gender, religion, colonial histories, nationalism, technology, ecology, and changing social norms. The volume explores transgressive, queer, feminist, posthuman, and more-than-human forms of love, revealing love as a powerful force that both sustains and unsettles communities.

Designed as an accessible and digestible reference, the chapters broaden understanding of the cultural politics of emotions for scholars and students in literary and cultural studies, world literature, gender studies, film studies, posthumanism, and the humanities more broadly. It offers a landmark contribution to the study of emotions and global culture for research and teaching alike.