This book aims at explaining romantic love between straight adults through literary texts of the western canon from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Each chapter comes with a multidisciplinary approach in which protagonists are mutilated in their quest for loving as alternative to annihilation.

The book emphasizes love as an obsession, thus as an exploration of the mind. From the passion-myth of Tristan and Isolde to the nihilist modernist representations, the western world has created a perverse concept of love. A love for nothingness, for death. Narcissistic and at times...