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Topic: Famous Love Stories? (Read 418 times)
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tafika
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Famous Love Stories?
« on: September 26, 2004, 09:13:54 am »
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OK, I need you guys to help me. If you would be so kind.
I need a list of famous love stories.
It's for a project I am doing in my Graphic Design course.
And I don't generally read love stories so I know of none.
All I've got is "Romeo and Juliet" lol
Can anyone help me? 
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Raiwen
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #1 on: September 26, 2004, 10:29:58 am »
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Wuthering Heights?
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tafika
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #2 on: September 26, 2004, 02:48:51 pm »
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Ahh, didn't think of that one.
Never read it, that's probably why 
Thanks Rai!
*Adds to list*
OK, now I have... 2.
Keep 'em coming... please? 
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Etahiel
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #3 on: September 27, 2004, 09:26:51 am »
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Hmm.. let me think..
"Gone with the wind" by Margaret Mitchell
"The romance of Tristan and Isold"? (i don't know if it's correct title)
"Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
hmm.. maybe some of Jane Austen like "Emma", "Sense and sensibility"
David Herbert Lawrence "Lady Chatterlay Lover"
Edith Wharton "Age of Innocence"
Hope that will help 
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Chrysanthemus
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #4 on: September 27, 2004, 09:30:24 am »
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Tristan and Isolda,and The legend of the Pigmaleon
what do you think of those? 
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tafika
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #5 on: September 27, 2004, 09:59:36 am »
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Ahh thanks guys!
This is great! 
*Hugs all*
I've never actually heard of most of them... but I'm not a love story person.
I trust yous anyway
Thanks!
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Etahiel
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #6 on: September 27, 2004, 10:31:46 am »
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Sorry, I make a mistake. There should be Chatterley not Chatterlay
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Chrysanthemus
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #7 on: September 27, 2004, 11:24:47 am »
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Quote from: tafika on September 27, 2004, 09:59:36 am
Ahh thanks guys!
This is great!
*Hugs all*
I've never actually heard of most of them... but I'm not a love story person.
I trust yous anyway
Thanks!
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you're welcome!
here is some information about the Pygmaleon/pigmaleon, I know it is too long, so obviously you won't read it all, but if you read here and there you'll get an over view of what it's about
There appears to be an emerging consensus that the nineteenth century was the golden age for retellings of the myth of Pygmalion. The art historian David Freedberg comments on the increased popularity at that time of Pygmalion as a subject of literature as well as of painting: "in the nineteenth century, [the myth of Pygmalion] also had its most important (and possibly most inventively interesting) literary influence."[1] Freedberg cites Balzac and Zola; critics of English literature have cited Hazlitt, Browning, Rossetti, and Hardy, among others.[2] One version no one ever cites is "Pygmalion, or The Cyprian Statuary" (1825) by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, yet this version is one of the richest and most powerful of all--and an important, if unacknowledged, influence on Browning.[3] Even the very few critics who have written on Beddoes have not had much time for "Pygmalion"; Douglas Bush, for instance, speaks of it as a poem "which most of [Beddoes's] critics have united in ignoring," and he goes on to ignore it himself.[4] Yet the poem is important not only to Beddoes's own development as an artist (he was twenty-one when he wrote it) but also to debates--as current now as they were then--about the function of inspiration in the work of the artist, the idea of the Romantic poet as a solitary figure, and the role of sexuality in the narrative of masculine artistic development.
The story of Pygmalion has taken many forms, but, at least in works before the nineteenth century, it is often read as a story of artistic and sexual triumph. Beddoes makes both of these kinds of triumph problematic. The sexuality of the artist in the poem is not directed toward the statue or an actual woman but back toward himself. In Beddoes's formulation, art, so often presented as a solitary activity in the Romantic period, becomes a form of that more popular solitary activity, masturbation. And in "Pygmalion" artistic activity is followed by the same "wasting conditions" believed to come from masturbation. Beddoes had approached the theme of artistic creation before, in his early poem "Alfarabi"; in "Pygmalion" he treats the theme more seriously, at greater length, and, by engaging with the versions of the myth created by Ovid and Rousseau, in a more consciously literary way. But by writing about masturbation, in however veiled a manner, Beddoes is also entering into an extended public discussion that had been going on for decades both on the Continent and in England, where one of the most prominent participants in the discussion was his own father, who died when the future poet was only five years old.[5] I want to look at both the medical and the poetic contexts for Beddoes's work before looking at the poem itself.
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The older Thomas Beddoes was a famous and successful doctor with wide-ranging scientific interests who published on various topics. In 1802, the year before the poet's birth, Dr. Beddoes published a three-volume compendium of medical advice and educational theories called Hygëia. In Essay IV, "Essay on the Individuals, Composing Our Affluent and Easy Classes, Part Second," the section called "Grand Source of Unhealthiness in the Male Sex" deals, very discreetly, with masturbation and with the wasting away of the habitual masturbator.[6] In his biography of Dr. Beddoes, Roy Porter says that
Masturbation became the target of many Georgian writers, who exposed it not just as a sin, vice, or character weakness, but as ruinous to health, because it supposedly induced wasting conditions. As reproductive biology increasingly conceptualized semen as a vital fluid, its onanistic waste was made to shoulder the blame for adolescent consumptions.[7]
In this respect, then, Dr. Beddoes's opinions on masturbation were the standard medical views of his time, although his focus in Hygëia is frequently what we would now call sociological rather than medical. Much of his remarkably well-written book is concerned with literature and its effects on the imaginations of young men. As Porter points out, in Hygëia "onanism was . . . disorder caused, or exacerbated, by the suggestive, seductive power of language" ("Forbidden Pleasures," p. 87).
Dr. Beddoes's emphasis on the power of language, which would perhaps seem strange in a medical writer today, is typical of the man and of the milieu in which he chose to live. Dr. Beddoes was married to the sister of Maria Edgeworth;[8] he was a close friend of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth; and he was himself a poet who had published a narrative poem on Alexander the Great. In his own career, then, Dr. Beddoes bridged the two worlds of science and art, at least partially. The younger Beddoes seems to have attempted to emulate his father by trying to transform himself into a doctor with literary interests. In terms of Beddoes's writing, for instance, an obvious connection can be made between his brilliance as an anatomist and his fascination with death and skeletons in most of his work--particularly in his play Death's Jest Book, a work that Beddoes began a few years after "Pygmalion" and that he never really finished. But, for various reasons, he was never able to establish himself as a medical man or, indeed, as a writer. The younger Beddoes can be said to have combined medicine and poetry largely by never achieving any material success in either.[9]
One of the things we can see in "Pygmalion," I think, is Beddoes's attempt to connect his own ideas about art with his father's work as a scientist. Unlike his son, Dr. Beddoes does not appear to have been especially interested in the nature and composition of the human body; rather, his concern was with the human in society, in combination with other humans. From this point of view, masturbation is particularly dangerous. Thomas Laqueur suggests that "the emphasis in the solitary vice should perhaps be less on `vice,' understood as the fulfillment of illegitimate desire, than on `solitary,' the channeling of healthy desire back into itself."[10] In nineteenth-century England, when achieving orgasm was referred to as "spending," desire was a natural resource that was intended to circulate in and contribute to the economy. To keep desire private was believed to cause the masturbator to waste away: the masturbator becomes a sexual miser and shares the miser's grim fate. Beddoes applies his father's views on masturbation to one of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry, artistic creation itself. Instead of concentrating, as his father did, on how certain kinds of literature can lead to masturbation, Beddoes makes a symbolic equivalence between masturbation and artistic creation. The fertility of the artist, who like the masturbator creates imaginary people and situations, is a poor substitute for the literal fertility of desire harnessed by marriage, which produces actual humans.
The connection that Beddoes makes in his poem can also be seen in a less explicit and more humorous form in Ovid's version of the Pygmalion story in the Metamorphoses. In Versions of Pygmalion J. Hillis Miller comments that "Ovid's description of the anthropomorphizing of Galatea strongly emphasizes the autoerotic side of this process" (p. 6). Pygmalion creates a sculpture of a woman more beautiful than any real woman and falls in love with his handiwork. Ovid concentrates on the details of Pygmalion's obsession with the statue--how he fondles it, kisses it, brings it presents, and dresses it.[11] As if to emphasize how bizarre Pygmalion's behavior is, Ovid here reverses the usual sequence of events behind the narratives of Roman (and other) love poetry, describing a sort of striptease in reverse. Pygmalion prays to Venus for help and eventually finds that his prayers have been answered:
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Chrysanthemus
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #8 on: September 27, 2004, 11:26:39 am »
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(Book X, ll. 291-94)[12]
At the beginning of the episode Pygmalion rejected real women because he was "offensus vitiis, quae plurima menti / feminae natura dedit" (Book X, ll. 244-45);[13] at the end he is rewarded with a woman who is perfect because she is made by art, not nature, and who identifies him, as Ovid's phrasing makes clear, with heaven itself. Ovid suggests that a fantasy object is better than a real person and that we prize art because it enables us to live in the world of the masturbatory fantasy; the episode thus seems to insist on the identification of artistic conceptions with masturbatory fantasies.[14]
The popularity of Ovid's version meant that Beddoes had a vast number of later treatments of the myth to consider. One version that we know he admired was Rousseau's Pygmalion, scène lyrique (written 1762). Shortly after finishing "Pygmalion" Beddoes wrote to a friend, "Don't look at J. J. Rousseau . . . his is much better because prose."[15] Unlike Donner, who does not see the reference as important, Douglas Bush did see Rousseau as an influence on Beddoes: "Though Beddoes went much beyond Rousseau's `Pygmalion,' I think he owed somewhat more to it than Mr. Donner admits" (p. 194, n. 57). Rousseau is significant to my reading of Beddoes not only because of his play but also because of the fact that he was one of the most prominent figures in the discussion on masturbation. In a famous passage in the Confessions Rousseau says that as a youth he learned "ce dangereux supplément qui trompe la nature et sauve aux jeunes gens de mon humeur beaucoup de désordres aux dépends de leur santé, de leur vigueur et quelquefois de leur vie"; he goes on to state that masturbation is very attractive for those with lively imaginations.[16] In many respects conventional, Rousseau's comments link masturbation and artistic activity: both art and masturbation deceive nature, and both are the results of a particularly vivid imagination. Rousseau's views on the dangers of masturbation turn up in many of his works, but they are particularly effectively presented in his version of Pygmalion.
When Rousseau's play begins, Pygmalion has already created the sculpture called Galatea. He sees his love for the statue as love for himself: "je ne puis me lasser d'admirer mon ouvrage; je m'enivre d'amour-propre; je m'adore dans ce que j'ai fait."[17] Like masturbation, the statue is at odds with nature: "Non jamais rien de si beau ne parut dans la nature; j'ai passé l'ouvrage des Dieux" (p. 1,226);[18] Pygmalion later refers to the statue as "cet affront à la nature" (p. 1,229; "this affront to nature"). Rousseau's Galatea is a material manifestation of the dangerous and unnatural fantasies against which Rousseau warns his readers in the Confessions, and Pygmalion eventually sees his love of his handiwork as a sign of madness: "Je crois, dans mon délire, pouvoir m'élancer hors de moi; je crois pouvoir lui donner ma vie, et l'animer de mon ame! Ah! que Pygmalion meure pour vivre dans Galathée!" (p. 1,228).[19] The statue is presented here as a product expelled by force ("élancer") from the body, like seminal discharge. Its continued existence in the world appears to be dependent on the death of its creator.
Pygmalion instantly retreats from this position and asks that both he and his statue may live, but the suggestion that a fantasy, once embodied, takes the life of its creator is not effaced. In any case, the ending of the play makes it difficult to see the two as separate and individual. Galatea has only four lines: "Moi" and "C'est moi" ("me; it is I") when she touches herself; "Ce n'est plus moi" ("It is no longer I") when she touches a statue; and "Ah! encore moi" ("Ah, still me") when she touches Pygmalion (pp. 1,230-31). Louis Marin points out that "dans une parole et un geste originaires, Galathée exhibe à son Auteur `son' origine auto-érotique."[20] Galatea's lines suggest the distinction to be made between the sculptor and the sculpted, only to blur it. They also suggest that knowledge of oneself comes from touching oneself: the sense of touch rather than the sense of sight is essential to perception of oneself and of the world around one. The play ends when Pygmalion says "c'est toi, c'est toi seule: je t'ai donné tout mon être; je ne vivrai plus que par toi" (p. 1,231).[21] Rather than the happy couple of Ovid's version (and most other versions as well), Rousseau gives us a shift in power, the absorption of the artist into his creation. Rousseau qualifies Ovid's happy ending by refusing to make the narrative transition from masturbation to heterosexual marriage; Beddoes was to go even further.
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Raiwen
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #9 on: September 27, 2004, 02:53:30 pm »
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Jane Eyre and Antony and Cleopatra for another Shakespeare one. my that's one depressing play.
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Glinda
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the scenario is too cliche.
 
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #10 on: September 27, 2004, 07:35:32 pm »
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West Side Story is a love story...well, it's a play, so I don't know if that would count. It's like Romeo and Juliet except...er, a play. And it's modern...whee!
Tony + Maria = <3
Hmm, I think that's all I can think of now...le hmm. I'll be back if I can think of any more.
WAIT! Aladdin. Little Mermaid. Just pick a bunch of Disney movies and it's bound to have love in it...lol. LADY AND THE TRAMP!!!
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tafika
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #11 on: September 28, 2004, 12:08:35 pm »
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Thanks guys!
These a great!
I need more... I have a lot of books to fill.
Sorry Glinda... I can't have films.
They're not... books.
lol
I have to draw a sentance.
Mine is:
A bookshop provides the story of love in supermarkets
So yeah, they have to be books.
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Etahiel
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Re:Famous Love Stories?
« Reply #12 on: September 28, 2004, 03:49:47 pm »
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Hmmm...you need more.. let me think.. some of the classic..
Maybe "Giaur" by George Byron?
Samuel Richardson "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded"
Jean-Jacques Rousseau "The New Heloise"
Goethe "The Sorrows of Young Werther"
Vladimir Nabokov "Lolita"
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