This book is moved by two main questions. Is Love a matter of beauty or mortality? In other words, is love an ethical ideal? Also, modernity understood as the age of mechanical reproduction, has shaped not simply our cities but our very same way of feeling. How has our conception of love changed, if it has, in the past two centuries?

This book is to address these questions. It is not to trace the evolution of the idea of love in Western culture, from Plato to the present day. It aims to bring to the surface different shades of love lingering at the heart of Western culture to rehabilitate the myth of love to its original credibility. Our confused civilization has split love into sensual and moral aspects but to be aware of it is perhaps to defeat a dilemma that seems so unnatural. This book is about how we make sense of our lives through love and how nineteenth and twentieth-century literature records it.