Love, Despair, and Modernism in Literature

by Alberto Castelli

This groundbreaking volume challenges conventional scholarship by illuminating a critical blind spot in modernist studies: the persistent yet transformed presence of love. While academia has exhaustively examined modernism through lenses of nihilism, disillusionment, and existential silence, the romantic impulse threading through these seemingly barren landscapes remains largely unexamined. How do characters love within the fractured architecture of modernist narratives? What becomes of romance when filtered through consciousness shaped by catastrophe? This collection reveals the sophisticated love story hidden within modernism’s formal innovations – a romance that neither escapes nor succumbs to the movement’s characteristic darkness, but rather transforms alongside it. By excavating this neglected dimension, we discover that modernist love does not vanish but evolves – becoming as complex, ambiguous, and revolutionary as the literary movement itself. The volume offers a fresh critical perspective that recontextualizes canonical works and invites readers to witness how intimacy persists, even as it whispers from the margins of a universe presumed silent. For scholars and students seeking to understand modernism’s full emotional landscape, this text provides the missing piece in our comprehension of one of literature’s most influential movements.