Book Project: Love Matter(s), 1789-1832
As it is currently imagined, Love Matters will use thing theory, affect theory, and new materialism to analyze Romantic writers’ fascination with ephemeral gestures that are exchanged as signs of love, what I call “love matter”—for example, kisses, touches, tears, looks (smiles/blushes), orgasms, and corpses. My analysis of the affective materiality of love will be organized in five sections of three short chapters each (Things, Gestures, Emotions, Body Parts, Words). Each chapter will situate a specific text within the larger cultural understanding and Romantic literary representations of its matter. These love things that are not things were, and still are, invested with great meaning, though they are fleeting. Their transience is part of their value, but they are also given the status of objects that define relationships to others. In analyzing these ephemeral objects, immaterial materialities, my book will explore and undo the relationship between the romantic and the Romantic, between the book and the ephemeral writing that often preserves these gestures, between the spontaneous gift and the act of memory required to maintain it, between subject and object, between passion and imagination. Thus, Love Matter(s) seeks to examine Romantic writers’ investment in memory and writing as ways of creating and sustaining self in a new context, the context of love, but shifts attention from passion which has been a central focus of scholarship, to the passionate gestures themselves, to the things that not only make up the lovers’ discourse but that constitute the affective materiality of love and lover.