Narrating the Passions. New Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Literature

The passions are at the heart of human experience. Literature, which foregrounds human experience, captures their complexity more acutely than the generalizations of theory. This collection of essays by leading comparatists acknowledges the timeless and ever-changing presence of passions in literary texts and responds to multiple and changing contexts. Through the analysis of a wide collection of well known and less familiar works, the authors of this volume explore some of the universal experiences of human passion: romantic love, seduction, parental affection, child-like wonder, obsession, indignation, melancholic apathy. A methodological concern links the different sections of the volume: is it possible to trace the vicissitudes of human passion through time and space? This concern finds a response in the comparative approach, which is perhaps the best way of capturing the complexity of human passions through the different periods and cultures that filter and reconfigure them. Comparative literary analysis, in combination with philosophical, psychological, sociological and psychoanalytic inquiry, enables the authors of this volume to map some of the passions that have been fascinating writers for thousands of years and that even now continue to shape our stories, and our lives.