Intimate behaviour is today a principal cause of social conflict in the USA. Drawing on a range of evidence, this study charts the change from a Victorian spiritual ideal of love to efforts by modern reformers to sexualize love.

The development of literature between 1800 and 1860 in the United States was heavily influenced by two wars. The War of 1812 hastened the development of nineteenth-century ideals, and the Civil War uprooted certain growths of those vigorous years. The half century between these dramatic episodes was a period of extravagant vigor, the final outcome being the emergence of a new middle class. Parrington argues that America was becoming a new world with undreamed potential. This new era was no longer content with the ways of a founding generation. The older America of colonial days had been static, rationalistic, inclined to pessimism, and fearful of innovation. During the years between the Peace of Paris (1763) and the end of the War of 1812, older America was dying. The America that emerged, which is the focal point of this volume, was a shifting, restless world, eager to better itself, bent on finding easier roads to wealth than the plodding path of natural increase. The culture of this period also changed. Formal biographies written in this period often gave way to eulogy; it was believed that a writer was under obligation to speak well of the dead. Consequently, scarcely a single commentary of the times can be trusted, and the critic is reduced to patching together his account out of scanty odds and ends. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights the life of Vernon Louis Parrington and explains the importance of this second volume in the Pulitzer Prize-winning study.

The proliferation of dating websites, printed personals and self-help relationship books reflect the new ways Americans seek close, personal relationships. Exposed to changing and often conflicting values, trends, and fashions—disseminated by popular culture, advertising and assorted "experts"—Americans face uncertainties about the best ways to meet important emotional and social needs. How do we establish lasting and intimate personal relationships including marriage? In Extravagant Expectations Paul Hollander investigates how Americans today pursue romantic relationships, with special reference to the advantages and drawbacks of Internet dating compared to connections made in school, college, and the workplace. By analyzing printed personals, dating websites, and advice offered by pop psychology books, he examines the qualities that people seek in a partner and also assesses the influence of the remaining conventional ideas of romantic love. Hollander suggests that notions of romantic love have changed due to conflicting values and expectations and the impact of pragmatic considerations. Individualism, high expectations, social and geographic mobility, changing sex roles, and the American national character all play a part in this fascinating and finally sobering exploration of men and women to find love and meaning in life.

The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Romantic Love in America: Cultural Models of Gay, Straight, and Polyamorous Relationships introduces the reader to the love and sex lives of two polyamorous, five gay, and eight straight individuals. Coupled with rich interview material, Victor C. de Munck provides a guided tour through the variable geography of love relationships as studied in the social sciences. de Munck describes evolutionary, cognitive, social, prototypical, triadic, and neural theories of romantic love and sex, concluding with an American cultural model of romantic love that delves into its relational properties as a dyad.