Product Description

A thinking-person's guide to romantic love, a bold and challenging book that makes the case for love in an age both cynical about and fearful of strong passion

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, political correctness, cynicism, pragmatism, and the commodification of sex have reduced romantic love to a discredited myth or a recreational sport—"a cause for embarrassment," argues Cristina Nehring. In her brilliantly researched first book, Nehring wrests romantic love from the clutches of retrograde feminists and cutting-edge capitalists, thrill-seeking convenience shoppers and safe-sex moralists. With help from celebrated lovers ranging from HÉlÖise and Abelard to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and from literature as diverse as Ovid's Art of Love and the poems of Emily Dickinson, Nehring celebrates the wild, irreverent, and uncompromising models of love we have inherited. As she rediscovers romantic love's fearless and heroic provenance, she challenges readers to demand partnerships that fully engage body, heart, and mind.

In an age when "settling" is encouraged and marriage is often described in business terms, Nehring's passionate defense of romantic love is timely and thoroughly refreshing. By reclaiming the right to love, to yearn, and—yes—to risk, A Vindication of Love aims to establish a new romantic paradigm for a new century.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82282 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-01
• Released on: 2009-06-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060765033
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Nehring's opening assertion that she argues by provocation and aims to anger reveals the rhetorical nature of her argument that our tepid age needs a return to true Eros. Just what she advocates is unclear, since her examples range from the chaste passion of Emily Dickinson through the frenzied sexuality of Edna St. Vincent Millay to the open relationship of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nehring does regret the collateral damage of this last pairing (a couple of cases of insanity and one suicide among their other lovers) and acknowledges that most of her case studies demonstrate excesses not to be emulated. That reduces her call for boldness in love to familiar clichés: absence makes the heart grow fonder; play hard to get; and defy social conventions in love (what is more of a postmodern cliché than advocating transgression?). Nehring, who has written for Harper's and the Atlantic among others, is a keen, empathic reader of literary texts, drawing attention to undervalued love writings like the letters of Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand, and offering an astute reading of Dickinson's much-debated Master letters. But overall, she is more preachy and patronizing than provocative. (June)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Nehring's book stirred much debate among critics, who generally disagreed that her answers to our sad state of love -- romantic excess and passion -- offer feasible solutions. After all, asked the Philadelphia Inquirer, what is so gratifying about love as a "tumultuous, emotional struggle [filled with] tedious existential angst"? Other critics took issue with the idea that modern-day society lacks passionate love. The Wall Street Journal further pointed out that Nehring's prescription rests on a type of feminism that impedes our emotional well-being -- and disagreed that passion thrives on gender inequalities. Although provoking and ambitious, Vindication left most critics with the feeling that "we should strive for something beyond her notion of love-as-heroic-quest" (Philadelphia Inquirer) -- and that readers should probably move on.

Review

For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary. But Cristina Nehring has a different idea. Her ardent polemic, "A Vindication of Love," puts forward a darker, more demanding vision of love. This is not, it should be said right away, a book without ambition: the subtitle is "Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century," though it is not exactly romance Nehring is writing about, but a more difficult, vital image of passion she believes we have lost.

"We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long," she writes, and in an examination of real and invented figures from the Wife of Bath to Frida Kahlo, she revels in love affairs that do not rely on our more hackneyed narratives. The result of Nehring's literary and historical inquiry is a celebration of the wilder, messier connections.

In her most provocative and interesting chapters, Nehring argues for the value of suffering, for the importance of failure. Our idea of a contented married ending is too cozy and tame for her. We yearn for what she calls "strenuously exhibitionistic happiness" -- think of family photos on Facebook -- but instead we should focus on the fullness and intensity of emotion. She writes of Margaret Fuller: "Fuller's failures are several times more sumptuous than other folks' successes. And perhaps that is something we need to admit about failure: It can well be more sumptuous than success. . . . Somewhere in our collective unconscious we know -- even now -- that to have failed is to have lived."

Nehring sees in the grandeur of feeling a kind of heroism, even if the relationship doesn't take conventional form or endure in the conventional way. For Nehring, one senses, true failure is to drift comfortably along in a dull relationship, to spend precious years of life in a marriage that is not exciting or satisfying, to live cautiously, responsibly. Is the strength of feeling redeemed in the blaze of passion even if it does not end happily? she asks. Is contentment too soft and modest a goal?

Nehring is writing in a previous mold, in the lost tradition of the Simone de Beauvoirs and Mary Wollstonecrafts that existed before the clotted irony, the obligatory, cool self-mockery, the endlessly indulgent self-deflation so popular today.

Nehring takes on our complaisance, our received ideas, our sloppy assumptions about our most important connections, and for that she deserves our admiration. Even if one doesn't take her outlandish romantic arguments literally, this is one of those rare books that could make people think about their intimate lives in a new way.

---- New York Times Book Review

Ms. Nehring implores us to remember what love is: "At its strongest and wildest and most authentic, love is a demon. It is a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism. Love is ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess. In many ways, it is divine madness -- and was recognized exactly as that as early as the time of Plato."

To make her case, she takes us into a dark forest to show us the doomed lovers Tristan and Iseult, lying with a sword between their hot bodies. She opens a window into Emily Dickinson's chaste New England boudoir, where we see the recluse penning breathless letters to her mysterious "Master." We hear the bawdy laughter of Chaucer's Wife of Bath, conquered at last (with a clout to the ear) by husband number five.

Any of these love stories submitted to a modern-day advice columnist would come back with a diagnosis of troubling pathologies: co-dependent adulterers, a sexually frustrated agoraphobe, a battered wife. Ms. Nehring wants us to see how impoverished this worldview is; how our fixation on successful, "healthy" relationships cuts us off from the profound, inspiriting and sometimes wounding effects of romantic intensity.

"A Vindication of Love" is a polemic, "an incitement to unruliness, a cry to battle." And of her fiery lovers Ms. Nehring writes: "We need not imitate their excesses, but we gain everything from seizing their inspiration." It's difficult to deny that she's on to something.

---- Wall Street Journal

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Customer Reviews

A Clear-Eyed Challenge to Deadening Cultural Trends
Nehring's sweeping study of the amorous drives of men and women from classical antiquity through the present is a delight on many levels. She writes with the wit and grace of the journalistic pundit she is, but her scholarship is thoroughgoing and illuminating--especially about texts educated readers too easily assume they know all there is to know about. Nehring has surprising yet supportable things to say about Plato's amorous dialogues, Dante's Vita Nova, Trstan and Iseult, and the emergent courtly tradition. She delves deeply into creative lives, especially women's, to underscore what is unavoidably a radical and challenging thesis: that passionate--even seemingly crazy passionate--love far from blinds lovers; it lights their way as no other condition can. In Nehring's view, Love, acknowledged for what it is, is the way out of the deadening cultural malaise created by love-averse pundits on both right and left. This is a no-category treasure of a book.

Love in the time of choler
Cristina Nehring navigates the rocky shoals between angry feminists and men honeslly confused by their movement to assert that we need a new time of "revived romantic hope...of fresh daring" between people who long for joy that love once seemed to promise to couples. She plumbs literature and literary biography to explore how love brought pain, joy, sorrow, and sublime engagement with life to her subjects, most of whom are from Western culture and the early modern world.
Her project is nothing less than to reinvent romantic love for the early 21st century, when we are often diverted by gender and power issues and a sense of triumphalism that sees marriage as the ultimate and only measure of success. (Not for a moment does she discount that wondrous outcome for many, however.)
It appears that Nehring's wellspring for her study may have come from her insight that "the more intelligent [women] are, the more ironical and distant [they] must be" to love's calling, its demands, its challenges. Au contraire, insists this American writer living in Paris: intelligent women are "excited by men."
For some of us, her chapter on "Love As Failure" may offer deep consolation over lives where love did not "succeed." She draws on the stories of Heloise and Abelard, Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther," and Ralph Waldo Emerson's love for Margaret Fuller. Each had its "brush with the sublime," she insists. Each partook of the "heroic and transcendent" nature of love, which we have lost and which she wants to "make honorable" again.
If you believe, or once did, that love held out a hope worthy of life itself, this book vindicates your belief. Argue against that proposition, if you will--but enjoy an inspiring argument, based in rich scholarship, and
presented in prose that doesn't miss a beat or a line.

All for Love
All for Love

This wonderfully learned, wonderfully exuberant defense of love looks simultaneously at how we live in the contemporary world and how great lovers have behaved in the past. Sadly, for all our freedom of choice and opportunity, we moderns finish a distant second (or fourth, or fifth) place. Taking on the received wisdom of the decades following the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 60s, Nehring draws from her deep reading of the classics to argue for the qualities usually seen as threats to a desirable relationship: inequality, transgression, long distance, aggression, among others. Although all this stuff mother warned you about can easily turn a couple into wrecks like Sid and Nancy rather than the idealized lovers Nehring lingers on, we forget at our peril how human nature craves risk and obstacle to confront and overcome.

In its humanity and range of reference--Nehring is equally at home among the writers of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern periods--this book reminds me of Ocavio Paz's splendid The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, on the same subject. But where Paz's book reflects on love after a long lifetime of experience, Nehring's plunges in with the spirit of youth and an appetite for more life, more experience. Although one does occasionally wish for a more vigilant editor--figures such as "the famous French novelist of the nineteenth century, Stendhal" and "the Greek philosopher, Plato" stumble into the book before finding surer footing in Nehring's larger arguments--the author's deep, personal engagement with her material makes this volume a compelling read.