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In the hands of a genius a love letter can become a great, even an immortal work of literature in its own right. Love Letters: Great Literary Romances examines the lives of great writers (John Keats; Franz Kafka; Leonard Woolf), a celebrated composer (Leoš Janácek) and two great lovers of mediaeval Europe (Abelard and Heloise) to see their turbulent and sometimes tormented romantic lives played out in the passionate declarations of love in the letters they wrote.

Love letters during the Napoleonic wars were largely framed by concepts of love which were promoted through novels and philosophy. The standard texts, so to speak, which were written by major authors who inherited this Enlightenment bearing, responded to the emerging concepts of love found in novels and philosophical essays. Love among this Napoleonic coterie is unique because it demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between the love letter and the romantic novel. Germaine de Staël, Juiette Récamier, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Lady Emma Hamilton, Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother, Lucien Bonaparte, were the authors and recipients of some of the most passionate love letters of this period. They were also avid readers of the newly emerging genre of the romantic novel, and many of them were also authors of such works where they projected their personal romances onto the characterization of their fictional heroes and heroines. In addition, these authors had lived through the recent French Revolution and the Terror. Imprisoned during the Revolution, or branded as emigrés upon their return to Paris, their mature adult lives were spent in the shadows of the Napoleonic wars in which they shifted political loyalties as the specter of Napoleon’s powers grew from First Consul to Emperor of Europe. The looming threat of war ignited the depths of their passions and inspired their intellectual analysis of love, happiness and suicide. Their evolving concept of love was a romantic, all-consuming passion which gripped the lovers in fatal embraces. This book’s analysis of their love letters and romantic novels reveals the emerging political landscape of the period through extended metaphors of love and patriotism.

This volume investigates the form of love letters and erotic letters in Greek and Latin up to the 7th Century CE, encompassing both literary and documentary letters (the latter inscribed and on papyrus), and prose and poetry. The potential for, and utility of treating this large and diverse corpus as a ‘genre’ is examined. To this end, approaches from ancient literary criticism and modern theory of genre are made; mutual influences between the documentary and the literary form are sought; and origins in proto-epistolary poetic texts are examined. In order to examine the boundaries of a form, limit cases, which might have less claim to the label ‘love letter’, are compared with more clear-cut examples. A series of case studies focuses on individual letters and letter-collections. Some case studies situate their subjects within the history and literary evolution of the love letter, using both intertextuality and comparative approaches; others placing them in their cultural and historical contexts, particularly uncovering the contribution of epistolarity to erotic discourse, and to the history of sexuality and gender in diverse eras and locations within Classical to Late Antiquity.

If the language we use influences and reflects the way that we see the world, then the fields of LOVE, SEX, and MARRIAGE, will show how speakers of English view their closest social and emotional relationships. Love, Sex, and Marriage provides a classification of English terms for these three fields from the earliest written records of the language until the present day. This volume makes it possible to trace changing attitudes towards social and sexual ties, and to understand those ties as earlier speakers of English did, through the language they used. The terms are arranged by meaning, and are listed chronologically within semantic fields, with their dates of usage. Notes on individual terms provide further information about their connotations and development. Language does not exist in isolation from the people who speak it, so background information about changes in social conditions, religious beliefs, and medical advancements is also included. A brief introduction to basic semantic terminology explains the principles behind the classification, and an alphabetical index facilitates the location of individual terms.