Carrying the Torch - Softcover

Payne, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1456835114 ISBN 13: 9781456835118

Publisher: Xlibris, 2010

Synopsis

Unrequited love has been a constant thread in art and culture all over the world for thousands of years, the stuff of classic novels, great poetry, music and film. Carrying the Torch examines this phenomenon, surveying the place of unrequited love in the world's art and in the lives of five great writers - three poets, one poet-novelist and one essayist - whose real-life experiences of unrequited love bought them untold pain but also provided them with inspiration for some of their greatest work.

About this title

From the Author

"When I want to read a book, I write one." So wrote the 19th century politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli - Washington Irving said something very similar - and it's a maxim which I've adopted as my own. Almost all of the writing I've done over many years has been based on wanting to read a book on a particular subject - a book which research told me didn't currently seem to exist. Carrying the Torch, like all my other books to date, was born out of the desire to read a good book on an interesting subject: finding nothing available that quite matched up to my expectations, I decided to write it myself. I wanted a good, general book about the phenomenon of unrequited love in the world's art, how important a theme it has been in novels, poems, music and film for so long, why artists keep coming back to it again and again, what it actually is, what it feels like and how it might be explained and so forth. I like to think that that's the book I've written. All the world loves a lover and most people, whether they openly admit it or not (and that includes a great many men!) love a good love story: as I make clear in the book, it doesn't seem to matter if the story has a tragic or at least unhappy ending, we don't enjoy it any less and may even enjoy it all the more, as the popularity of `weepies' in book or film form attests.

About the Author

Steven Payne lives and writes in his home county of Leicestershire. Carrying the Torch is his first published book: he is currently working on a second non-fiction book and on a novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Xlibris
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1456835114
• ISBN 13: 9781456835118
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 348