Abstract

In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal. In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities.

Luisa Passerini was Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turin, and iscurrently External Professor at the European University Institute, Florence, and Visiting Professor in the Oral History Master Program, Columbia University, New York.  She has published widely on the historical relationships between the discourse on Europe and the discourses on love, gender and generation, and on memory and subjectivity. She was coeditor of Women Migrants from East to West: Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe (Berghahn Books 2007).

"This is a wonderful collection of richly textured, suggestive, and often meticulous essays that interrogate the inter-twined histories of love and European identity. Imaginative readings of diverse archives that go deep into Europe's pasts and extend sideways to her colonies and margins will make this volume indispensable to all contemporary debates on the 'meanings of Europe'. It will also speak to readers far beyond the geographical confines of the continent."  ·  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South
Asian Studies

Liliana Ellena is a historian working at the University of Turin, Italy. She has edited the new Italian edition of Frantz Fanon's I dannati della terra (2000), is the coauthor of Il Quarto Stato. La fortuna di un'immagine tra cultura e politica (2002), and has recently co-edited a special issue of Zapruder (2007) on transnational women’s movements.

Alexander C.T. Geppert is Emmy Noether Research Group Director at Freie Universität Berlin. He has held various long-term fellowships in Berkeley, Paris, London, Vienna, Essen and at Harvard University. His publications include numerous articles, five edited volumes as well as Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-siècle Europe (2010), and Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (editor, 2010).