How the French invented love : nine hundred years of passion and romance /

Acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom distills the central tenets of the Gallic gospel of love from her reading of the great French literary works, as well as from the people she has known and her own memories of France, examining almost a thousand years of divine culture in search of the intimate moments...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	Yalom, Marilyn
Format:	Book
Language:	English
Published:	New York, NY : Harper Perennial, [2012]
Edition:	1st ed.
Subjects:	Man-woman relationships > France > History. Love > France > History. Sex customs > France > History. France > Moral conditions > History. France > Social life and customs. National characteristics, French. French literature > History and criticism. Love in literature. Sex in literature.

Table of Contents:

Abélard and Héloïse, patron saints of French lovers
Courtly love : how the French invented romance
Gallant love : La Princesse de Clèves
Comic love, tragic love : Molière and Racine
Seduction and sentiment : Prévost, Crébillon fils, Rousseau, and Laclos
Love letters : Julie de Lespinasse
Republican love : Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland
Yearning for the mother : Constant, Stendahl, and Balzac
Love among the Romantics : George Sand and Alfred de Musset
Romantic love deflated : Madame Bovary
Love in the Gay Nineties : Cyrano de Bergerac
Love between men : Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, and Gide
Desire and despair : Proust's neurotic lovers
Lesbian love : Colette, Gertrude Stein, and Violette Leduc
Existentialists in love : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
The dominion of desire : Marguerite Duras
Love in the twenty-first century.