From Chariclea and Theagen to Cui Yingying and Zhang Sheng: How romantic fictions inform us about the cultural evolution of pair-bonding in Eurasia - CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique Accéder directement au contenu
Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2021

From Chariclea and Theagen to Cui Yingying and Zhang Sheng: How romantic fictions inform us about the cultural evolution of pair-bonding in Eurasia

Nicolas Baumard

Résumé

In Love and the Western World, Denis de Rougemont famously suggested that 'romantic love', the idea that love is key in human existence, emerged suddenly in 12th c. France. More recent scholarship in literary history suggests that the emergence of romantic love is general phenomenon in history. Similar increase in the importance of love can be detected in the Arab world, in India, in Persia, in China and in Japan. In this paper I discuss the idea that feelings depicted in narrative fictions correspond to the modern scientific characterization of romantic love, and thus may function as an indicator of a behavioral and psychological change in people's preferences for pair bonding. I also show that literary transmission chains (e.g., the Trojan War, from the Greek epic Iliad to the Hollywood film Troy) can help us study cultural shifts in the importance of love, as the increasing importance of love has greatly transformed the original stories, infusing them with romantic elements and sometimes radically changing the nature of the relationships between the original characters. Ironically, I suggest that this very phenomenon hinders the ability of modern readers to detect the absence of love in ancient fictions, as modern readers have first encountered the older stories through their modern, more romantic rewrites, whether in film, play, novel, or children's story form, and cannot help but project the modern version onto the older ones.
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hal-03907510 , version 1 (20-12-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03907510 , version 1

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Nicolas Baumard. From Chariclea and Theagen to Cui Yingying and Zhang Sheng: How romantic fictions inform us about the cultural evolution of pair-bonding in Eurasia. 2021. ⟨hal-03907510⟩

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