Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union

by Ashley Shelden

Overview

The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of love—it explodes it, queers it, and makes it unrecognizable. Rather than providing union, connection, and completion, love in contemporary fiction destroys the possibility of unity, harbors negativity, and foregrounds difference.

Comparing contemporary and modernist depictions of love to delineate critical continuities and innovations, Unmaking Love locates queerness in the novelistic strategies of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hari Kunzru. In their work, "queer love" becomes more than shorthand for sexual identity. It comes to embody thwarted expectations, disarticulated organization, and unnerving multiplicity. In queer love, social forms are deformed, affective bonds do not bind, and social structures threaten to come undone. Unmaking Love draws on psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies to read love's role in contemporary literature and its relation to queer negativity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231543156
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Series:	Literature Now
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	892 KB

About the Author

Ashley T. Shelden is associate professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unmaking Love
1. Lesbian Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
2. The Ends of Love: Amorous Redemption, the Passion for Negativity, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy
3. Amorous Time: Nostalgia, Temporality, and the Pursuit of Optimism in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty
4. Cosmopolitan Love: Encountering Difference in Hari Kunzru's Transmission and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Conclusion: Otherness, Cloud Atlas, and Contemporary Literature
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Check your head, and check your math—these are the lessons of Unmaking Love, which brilliantly elaborates the point that 1 + 1 = 1. Using the tools of queer theory to light up the negativity at the heart of the twentieth-century novel, Ashley Shelden argues that love without aggression is not love. A valiant attempt to save us from the banality of love and from its mortal terrors.

Heather K. Love

Some say that love is blind, others that it is bland. Unmaking Love, in forceful readings of Modernist to post-Modernist writers from Joyce and Barnes to Kunzru and Kureishi, restores not only the ambivalence but also the danger, even deadliness, that the last hundred years of fiction have plotted in the name of love. Love used to be the end of the story: Unmaking Love restores the needling narratibility and reminds us of how little we understand this thing that bears such a seemingly self-evident name.

Elaine Freedgood

Ashley T. Shelden has written a fascinating and important book that is a pleasure to read and which will have broad impact on both literary studies and queer theory. With attentive and graceful style, she traces how the fantasy that love means 2-united-as-1 deconstructs itself throughout twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Unmaking Love provides a major contribution to the fields of modernist literature and contemporary literature, as well as to the theorization of love.

Jane Gallop

As part of the 'Literature Now' series at Columbia University Press, Unmaking Love breaks new ground through its combined focus on high modernist and contemporary novels. . . . Shelden consistently writes with humor and style, making this survey of romantic failure, loss, dejection, and fracture an unexpected pleasure to read.

Contemporary Literature - Jill Richards

This is an imaginatively conceived and passionately argued book, which stares that most cherished of literary preoccupations, love, in the eye and proposes that—in the world of contemporary literary fiction, at least—its days may be numbered.

Modern Fiction Studies - Lynne Pearce