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.
- 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
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