Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union

The contemporary novel does more than revise our conception of love—it explodes it, queers it, and makes it unrecognizable. Rather than providing union, connection, and completion, love in contemporary fiction destroys the possibility of unity, harbors negativity, and foregrounds difference. Unmaking Love explores the novelistic strategies that Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureshi, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hari Kunzru have used to fracture the ideal of romantic fusion. Working within the emergent field of love studies, Unmaking Love draws on cutting-edge theories in psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies to read love’s role in contemporary literature and its relation to queer negativity. It also compares modern-day and modernist depictions of love to delineate critical continuities and innovations.