1st Edition

The Materiality of Love Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice

Edited By Anna Malinowska, Michael Gratzke Copyright 2018
    296 Pages
    by Routledge

    296 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Drawing on love studies and research in material cultures, this book seeks to re-examine love through materiality studies, especially their recent incarnations, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy, to spark a debate on the relationship between love, objects and forms of materializing affection. It focuses on love as a material form and traces connections between feelings and materiality, especially in relation to the changing notion of the material as marked by digital culture, as well as the developments in understanding the nature of non-human affect. It provides insight into how materiality, in its broadest sense, impacts the understanding of the meanings and practices of love today and reversely, how love contributes to the production and transformation of the material world. 

    Introduction: Love Matters



    Anna Malinowska and Michael Gratzke



    Part I: Material Love



    1. Love Materialism. Technologies of Feeling in the Post-Material World (An Interview)



    Dominic Pettman



    2. Love Among Objects: Poetry and Time in Light of the Phenomenology of Values



    Jacek Mydla



    3. Love is Tender: A Critical Approach to Pansexualism



    Julie Reshe



    Part II: Affective Connections. Materializing the Amorous



    4. Between the Covers: Couples Making Books Together as a Practice of Love



    Yvonne Clarke-Salt



    5.Overcoming Absence: From Love Letters to Skype



    Camilla Skovbjerg Padlam



    6.The Matter of Kissing



    Anna Malinowska 



    Part III: Objectified Amour: Representation and Social Practice



    7. The Rise and Fall of ‘Emotional Capitalism’: Consumerism and Materialities of Love in Dystopian Works by Thomas Melle, Leif Randt and Gary Shteyngart



    Michael Gratzke



    8. Reifying Innocence: Material Contexts of Love in The Age of Innocence and The Museum of Innocence



    Hulya Yagcioglu



    9.Organic Love: Reclaiming Solidity Through Nature and Farming



    Karolina Lebek



    10.(Dis)Affectionate Fetishism: Dispossessed Love in Othello and Late Modernity



    Adrian Howe



    Part IV: Affectionate Subjectivity



    11. Exploring Maternal Affective Investments: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79) and the Material Narrative of Love



    Justyna Wierzchowska



    12. The Amorous Frenzy of Things: Georges Bataille’s Basely Material Love



    Michał Krzykawski



    13. The Queer Love Life of Photo(n)s



    Tomasz Sikora



    Part V: Creating Forms of Love



    14. Embodied Soulmarks and Social Expectations: The Materialization of Ro

    Biography

    Anna Malinowska is Assistant Professor in literary and cultural studies at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (IECL), University of Silesia, Poland.



    Michael Gratzke is Professor of German and Comparative Literature as well as Associate Dean for Research at the University of Hull, UK.