Abstract
Since its appearance as the maximal expression of romantic love in the chivalric literature of the medieval period, the lip kiss has migrated to all genres, from romantic novels to adventure stories where heroes and heroines are involved as much in romance as they are in bellicose escapades. As we saw in the previous chapter, some historians trace the custom of sending verses on cards on Valentine’s Day to the letter written by St. Valentine to his paramour while he was in jail. Others trace it to a fifteenth-century episode connected with Charles, Duke of Orleans. He was captured by the English during the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, taken to England and put in prison. On Valentine’s Day, he sent his wife a poem from his cell in the Tower of London telling her how much he loved her. Others still trace it to Chaucer’s times, also as we saw. Whatever the case may be, it is obvious that romance seeks expression not only through the lips, but also through the written word.1
We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
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Notes
For a historical account of the Valentine card, see Ernest Dudley Chase, The Romance of Greeting Cards (Boston: Rust Craft, 1956).
E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904–1962 (New York: Liveright, 1991), pp. 13–14.
Guillaume IX, “Farai chansoneta nueva,” in Les Chansons de Guillaume IX, ed. A. Jeanroy (Paris: Champion, 1927), p. 20.
Bernart Marti, “Amar dei,” Les poesies de Bernart Marti, ed. E. Hoepffner (Paris: Champion, 1929), p. 3.
Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, trans. Andrew Frisardi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012).
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, trans. Charles S. Singleton and C. H. Grandgent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933).
A good account of the role of Jezebel in the popular imagination is the one by Lesley Hazleton, Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001).
Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Random House, 1963).
See Lucy Huskinson (ed.), Dreaming the Myth Onwards: New Directions of Jungian Therapy and Thought (London: Routledge, 2008).
For a discussion of the Samson and Delilah story form a modernist perspective, see Ginger Garrett, Desired: The Untold Story of Samson and Delilah (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2011).
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kinds of England, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1966).
Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008).
Andrea Hopkins, The Book of Courtly Love: The Passionate Code of the Troubadours (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).
Stanley Wells, Looking for Sex in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), p. 43.
Daniel Boorstin, The Image (New York: Vintage, 1961).
Good treatments of the celebrity phenomenon can be found in Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997);
P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage Publications, 2004);
and Ellis Cashmore, Celebrity Culture (London: Routledge, 2006).
Jeff Guinn, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), p. 6
In Evangeline Bruce, Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage (New York: Scribner, 1995).
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983).
See Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Daniel Heinsius (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1978).
Richard J. Bowring, Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847).
E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (New York: Vintage, 2012).
Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular literature, 2nd ed. (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, trans. Nicoletta Simborowski and Neil Phillip (New York: Clarion Books, 1993).
James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World (New York: Crown, 2000).
Karen Harvey, The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956).
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© 2013 Marcel Danesi
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Danesi, M. (2013). The Kiss in Stories, Real and Fictional. In: The History of the Kiss!. Semiotics and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376855_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376855_3
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