'How important is romantic love in Australian culture? How have Australians portrayed falling in love? And how is this process related to sex, intimacy and marriage? Does gender shape the performance and expression of love? Has romantic love been co-opted by the market and repackaged as a product for consumption? Is there a role for romantic love in nation-building? This book explores how love was represented in Australia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. It looks at the courtship practices of colonial Australians and what they understood by love. It traces the rise in popularity of Valentine’s Day. It analyses how love has been represented in film, television mini-series, romance novels, comics, pop and country music, the literature of sexology, and representations and political debates about same-sex love and marriage.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'The history of romantic love has a long precedent, with the emotion/s and its practices situated as a key development in the production of modernity for the social historians of the 1970s. Since then, scholars in disciplines as diverse as history, literature, politics, sociology, anthropology, geography and the biological sciences have sought to explore, contest and rethink what romantic love is; whether it is a product of nature or nurture, and its cultural dimensions; and its implications for key sociological ideas, including the shape of the family, gender equality, and production of the modern. The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australiaoffers a twofold contribution to this scholarship. First, it seeks to ask whether Australia has its own version of romantic love, and, if so, how is that expressed, contested, and how has it evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, it seeks to explicitly consider how romantic love is depicted in a wide variety of popular cultural forms, from Valentine’s Day cards to film and television to novels and comic books to hillbilly music and rock and roll. It seeks to give an account of the cultural practices grouped under the umbrella of ‘romantic love’ and how these might shape what we think it is.' (Introduction)
'The history of romantic love has a long precedent, with the emotion/s and its practices situated as a key development in the production of modernity for the social historians of the 1970s. Since then, scholars in disciplines as diverse as history, literature, politics, sociology, anthropology, geography and the biological sciences have sought to explore, contest and rethink what romantic love is; whether it is a product of nature or nurture, and its cultural dimensions; and its implications for key sociological ideas, including the shape of the family, gender equality, and production of the modern. The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australiaoffers a twofold contribution to this scholarship. First, it seeks to ask whether Australia has its own version of romantic love, and, if so, how is that expressed, contested, and how has it evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, it seeks to explicitly consider how romantic love is depicted in a wide variety of popular cultural forms, from Valentine’s Day cards to film and television to novels and comic books to hillbilly music and rock and roll. It seeks to give an account of the cultural practices grouped under the umbrella of ‘romantic love’ and how these might shape what we think it is.' (Introduction)
