Main description:

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.

Contents:

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

Michal 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 Romantic Love in Soulmate AU Fiction

Kinga Kowalska

15. Citizen Snake: Uncoiling Human-Bindings for Life

Suzan Pyke

16. Reconfigured Families: Stories About Love

Michele Ellmitt

17. As a Matter of Love: A Short Dialogue on Love Made Material

Francesca Rendle-Short and Melody Ellis