Eros and Thanatos. Love across Civilizations by Alberto Castelli

With “Eros and Thanatos: Love across Civilizations,” Alberto Castelli affords readers with a moving study of love and death’s profound roles across the great history of civilization. An ambitious and pioneering work, “Eros and Thanatos” offers a perceptive, interdisciplinary reading of love’s eternal mysteries across Western culture.

Dr. Kenneth Womack

Professor of English and Popular Music

Monmouth University, USA

In this engaging work, the author explores the bottomless mysteries of love. He reveals the most dramatic of all–how love is profoundly intertwined to death across civilizations. There is much psychology and sociology in the way the author treats death. The author is correct to say that few studies attempt to explain the phenomenon of romantic love in its entirety after de Rougement’s and Singer’s texts. Scholarship tends to focus on a smaller and more manageable corpus, such as the works of one or two authors or a more defined period. “Eros and Thanatos” is, therefore, ambitious in scope and potentially pioneering in terms of academic research. I think the book can attract the Western reader because this reader can find in it an alternative version of a story one already knows. But it can also attract the non-Western reader because one will come across a story heard before but never fully understood.

Prof. Dr. Lifang Bai

Hainan University, China

Although love and death are eternal themes in world literatures, it is Alberto Castelli who for the first time gives a detailed illustration from a theoretical perspective. It is particularly impressive that the author has reached such a convincing conclusion: beauty can be immoral and love must die to preserve the illusion of beauty.

Wang Ning

Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

By analyzing the ways literature narrates love in the past 200 hundred years, Alberto Castelli ingeniously ties in the theme of love with the motif of death and treats them as a total scheme of universal appeal, thus bringing the age-old topic to the level of contemporaneity. Incisive anatomies with multiple literary theories are in full play by a true expert. This book is undoubtedly a masterpiece of cultural study and a must-read for students of world literature.

Xiaoping Wang

Distinguished Professor

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China