ABSTRACT
Introduction: Historical and Contemporary Narratives of Romantic Love Romantic love is often defined by contemporary theorists as a product of Western cultural history. However Octavio Paz (1996) in his analysis of love and the erotic-The Double Flame: Essays on Love and Eroticism shows that it can be found in all societies and in different historical periods. While the performance of “a culture of love” emerged within court societies in the West, as Featherstone (1998: 2) notes, and became an expression of love as a “privileged body of knowledge and practice by a small group of men and women,” it was not restricted to the West. Drawing on Paz, Featherstone (1998) shows that:
. . . this form of courtly love emerged not only in Europe but in the Islamic world, India and East Asia too. The Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Ts’ao Hsueh-ch’in and the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikubu both describe love affairs in the courtly aristocratic world (Paz 1996: 29ff). Both books point to the close relationship between a high courtly culture and a philosophy of love-something which is absent from many accounts of the history of love.
