Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love

A major study of Kierkegaard and love exploring his description of love's treachery, difficulty, and hope.

Amy Laura Hall (Author)

9780521809139, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 August 2002

236 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love does make several welcome corrections to the received interpretation of Kierkegaard … Hall's work offers us an extremely contentious but nevertheless supportable and scholarly reading of Kierkegaard … clarification, reasoned provocation and insightful exposition …'. The Heythrop Journal

This is a major study of Kierkegaard and love. Amy Laura Hall explores Kierkegaard's description of love's treachery, difficulty, and hope, reading his Works of Love as a text that both deciphers and complicates the central books in his pseudonymous canon: Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Either/Or, and Stages on Life's Way. In all of these works, the characters are, as in real life, complex and incomplete, and the conclusions are perplexing. Hall argues that a spiritual void brings each text into being, and her interpretation is as much about faith as about love. In a style that is both scholarly and lyrical, she intimates answers to some of the puzzles, making a poetic contribution to ethics and the philosophy of religion.

Introduction
1. The call to confession in Kierkegaard's Works of Love
2. Provoking the question: deceiving ourselves in Fear and Trembling
3. The poet, the vampire, and the girl in Repetition with Works of Love
4. The married man as master thief in Either/Or
5. Seclusion and disclosure in Stages on Life's Way
6. On the way.

Subject Areas: Christian theology [HRCM], History of Western philosophy [HPC]