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Love at a Crux
The New Persian Romance in a Global Middle Ages
Cameron Cross (Author)
9781487547271
Hardback, published 5 December 2023
390 pages, 3 b&w illustrations
24.9 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.67 kg
Love at a Crux presents the emergence of versified love stories in the New Persian language as a crucial event in the history of romance. Using the tale of Vis & Rāmin (w. 1054) as its focal point, the book explores how Persian court poets in the eleventh century reconfigured "myths" and "fables" from the distant past in ways that transformed the love story from a form of evening entertainment to a method of ethical, political, and affective self-inquiry. This transformation both anticipates and helps to explain the efflorescence of romance in many medieval cultures across the western flank of Afro-Eurasia. Bringing together traditions that are often sundered by modern disciplinary boundaries, Love at a Crux unearths the interconnections between New Persian and comparable traditions in ancient and medieval Greek, Arabic, Georgian, Old French, and Middle High German, offering scholars in classics, medieval studies, Middle Eastern literatures, and premodern world literature a case study in literary history as connected history.
Reader’s Notes An Act of Creation 2. Ethics: An Affair of Conscience The Ethos of Romantic Love 3. Authority: The Prisoner of His Skin "All Kings Were His Slaves" 4. Affect: The Limits of Lyric Lyrics, Episodes, and Adventure-Time 5. History: The Death of Romantic Love Transcribing the Soul Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendices Appendix A: A Summary of Vis & Rāmin Exordium Appendix B: Rāmin’s Songs Rāmin Falls in Love Appendix C: Concordance Bibliography Index
Prologue: In Which Love Has Many a Tale
A Heterogeneous Text
Re-congnizing Romance
The Medieval Globe
Mythos and Ethos
Love at a Crux
1. Phantasy: The Rise of Romance
Legends and Legerdemain
Heroic Lives and Amorous Tales
By Way of Symbol
Why Read Romance?
Like Kingly Pearls
Conflicting Signals and False Starts
Vis Unveiled
From Media to Marv: A Tale of Three Seductions
A New Covenant
Beholding Mehr
The Sacred Bond
The Iron Band
Un/knowing the Truth
Smashing the Mirror
"The World is a Dream"
Episode 1 Mode-Switching
Episode 2 Lyrical Reality
Episode 3The Mirror of the Self
Episode 4 A Crisis of Authority
Breakdown and Breakup
The Final Word
Love-Death (Liebestod)
False Death (Scheintod)
Endings and Beginnings
From Media to Marv
A King’s Collapse
Vis and Rāmin Separate
Death and Deliverance
Rāmin Woos Vis
Episode 1: The Ordeal
Episode 2: The Bed-Trick
Episode 3: The Devil’s Grotto
Episode 4: The Garden
The Breakup
The Coup