Love in Literature: Why Read about it?

van Peer, Willie and Chesnokova, Anna (2025) Love in Literature: Why Read about it? Колективна (три і більше авторів). Springer, Cham.

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Abstract

ove stories play a fundamental role in the lives of people, as the theme of love pervades all of literature. And this interest in the topic of love has not waned. Publishing love stories is a multibillion business. Apparently, humans are not content with loving and being loved; they also want to read about other people’s love. Why? In this chapter, we propose several motifs for reading about love in fiction, based on insights from sexology and expert relation therapy. Love stories apparently transfer experiences through the written word into meaningful experiences that, although knowingly fictional, nevertheless are of the utmost importance to readers. After presenting some data on love literature and basic impediments to human love relations, we offer some escape routes from desire (through death, divorce, and extramarital affairs), arguing that the road to desire in relations is hardly represented in fictional literature, with one exception, what we call “the magic of love.” With this, we mean that in reading literature, words have to be pronounced ad verbatim so that, similarly to magical practices, they produce the desired effect on the reader. In a final section, we reflect on the urgent need to investigate reading about love through more rigorous, empirical, research methods than the speculative ones employed so far in literary studies.

Item Type:	Monograph (Колективна (три і більше авторів))
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Love; rationale for love stories; effects of reading; love stories; evolutionary perspective on love; relation therapy
Subjects:	Монографії > Видані в іноземному видавництві мовами ОЕСР/ЄС
Divisions:	Факультет романо-германської філології > Кафедра лінгвістики та перекладу
Depositing User:	Анна Вадимовна Чеснокова
Date Deposited:	11 Sep 2025 09:20
Last Modified:	11 Sep 2025 09:20
URI:	https://elibrary.kubg.edu.ua/id/eprint/53122

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