First published in 1986, this ground-breaking work addresses two complex and very human emotions—love and erotic passion—as these appear in the great love stories of the world. Starting with the story of Romeo and Juliet and its roots in European Christianity, the authors uncover hidden depths of cultural and universal significance in famous romantic tales of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent—‘Layla and Majnun’, ‘Heer and Ranjha’, ‘Sohni and Mahinwal’, ‘Vis and Ramin’, and ‘Radha and Krishna’. Moving westward again, the authors look at the Greek myth of Oedipus, the Celtic saga of Tr ... More

First published in 1986, this ground-breaking work addresses two complex and very human emotions—love and erotic passion—as these appear in the great love stories of the world. Starting with the story of Romeo and Juliet and its roots in European Christianity, the authors uncover hidden depths of cultural and universal significance in famous romantic tales of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent—‘Layla and Majnun’, ‘Heer and Ranjha’, ‘Sohni and Mahinwal’, ‘Vis and Ramin’, and ‘Radha and Krishna’. Moving westward again, the authors look at the Greek myth of Oedipus, the Celtic saga of Tristan and Isolde, the tragic drama of Hamlet, the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus, and a contemporary handling of the love theme in the writings of Vladimir Nabokov. With each love story including within its gambit all of love’s paradoxical associations and radii—from conquest and possession to surrender, sensuality and sensuousness, time held still in a poised nostalgia, and the loss of visual, distal perceptions in another mode of knowing—this book elaborates on the phenomenology and what it calls the ontogeny of love, sex, and danger. In this second edition, the authors revisit their earlier assertions about romantic and erotic love in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and literary theory.