His wet shirt glistened in the summer haze.  "Romantic love," he offered, "Was its Western manifestation unique, a response to early industrialisation?" 

 

Images of muscled men with sweat and soot upon the brow filled her fevered mind. 

"Is it a stage in the liberation struggle of women?" she countered. "Consider chivalric romance, Goethe, Gyorgy Lukacs. What of romance as a continuation of the spirit of the French revolution, a struggle within liberalism?" 

 

Meanwhile, the blacksmith and the heiress were arguing about Jane Austen. 

 

Then the doorbell trilled ominously. You could hear their breathing. It was the postman delivering a package. 

 

He proffered A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, two inverted commas in 69 on the cover, and shards of Sappho. Plus, the gypsy maps of Damian Le Bas. 

 

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Love and Structure - Charles Lindholm (1998) 

 

The Sorrows of Young Werther by JW von Goethe (1774) 

 

Samaritans 

 

The Sorrows Of Young Werther - Georg (György) Lukács (1936) 

 

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat - Georg Lukacs (1923) 

 

Bryter Later - Nick Drake 

 

Elizabeth crossing the field 

 

Chuck Tingle 

 

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes (1977) at Hive 

 

Poems of Sappho. Translated by Julia Dubnoff 

 

Maps - Gypsy Dada by Damian Le Bas