Ashley T. Shelden has written a fascinating and important book that is a pleasure to read and which will have broad impact on both literary studies and queer theory. With attentive and graceful style, she traces how the fantasy that love means 2-united-as-1 deconstructs itself throughout twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Unmaking Love provides a major contribution to the fields of modernist literature and contemporary literature, as well as to the theorization of love.
Jane Gallop, Distinguished Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Some say that love is blind, others that it is bland. Unmaking Love, in forceful readings of Modernist to post-Modernist writers from Joyce and Barnes to Kunzru and Kureishi, restores not only the ambivalence but also the danger, even deadliness, that the last hundred years of fiction have plotted in the name of love. Love used to be the end of the story: Unmaking Love restores the needling narratibility and reminds us of how little we understand this thing that bears such a seemingly self-evident name.
Elaine Freedgood, professor of English, New York University Check your head, and check your math-these are the lessons of Unmaking Love, which brilliantly elaborates the point that 1 + 1 ? 1. Using the tools of queer theory to light up the negativity at the heart of the twentieth-century novel, Ashley Shelden argues that love without aggression is not love. A valiant attempt to save us from the banality of love and from its mortal terrors.
Heather K. Love, associate professor of English, University of Pennsylvania