Chapter 5 examines the renegotiation of kinship and gender relations within Tunisia’s post-revolutionary public sphere. Activists across gender and ideological lines confront the persistence of patriarchal discourses that shaped both the 2011 revolution and the subsequent democratic transition up to 2016. Legitimising hierarchy in both private and public spheres. In response, activists work to dismantle traditional filiation and its gendered consequences, seeking new forms of alliance and intimacy. This process challenges dominant conceptions of the Tunisian public and reflects broader efforts to rethink social relations in democratic spaces. Drawing on the anthropology of revolution and democracy which considers both experiences as profoundly social’, the chapter engages with North African scholarship on the intersection of kinship and politics, applying it’s insights to the evolving dynamics of Tunisia’s (post)revolutionary democracy.

Over successive centuries, Americans have routinely narrated war stories as love stories: melodramas in which men's dedication to soldiering is rewarded by women's devotion to soldiers. In reality, though, love and war rarely march in lockstep. This essay explores the multivalent languages of love that wartime Americans have spoken: patriotic love of country; homosocial love of comrades; sentimental love of home; and romantic love of absent partners. Although often invoked simultaneously, these attachments do not coexist easily. While love is conjured as the redeeming grace that makes suffering bearable, the experience of being at war—departure from home, separation from loved ones, and the specter of injury or death—is just as likely to corrode affective bonds as to strengthen them. Using a thematic approach, this essay proposes that the complexities of emotional life in wartime—from heteronormative expectations to homosocial bonds, and the fragility of wartime intimacy—can only be understood through a war and society approach. In short, we must be as attentive to service personnel and the armed forces as we are to civilians and the social structures within which they're embedded.

Chapter 6 opens with a discussion of some of the letters Keats sent his brother and sister-in-law after they migrated to America in the summer of 1818. It explores the paradox that letters can at times generate a sense of intimacy not so much in spite of distance but because of it. It looks at the way in which Keats can find people ‘pressing’ on him, and even oppressive, such that he can seem to value the prosthetic sense of presence offered by a letter and the personal space it can allow a different kind of intimacy. The second half of the chapter considers letters as ‘touching’, particularly in relation to Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne, where he seems particularly attuned to the physical touch of a letter and the way that a letter can be emotionally ‘touching’ precisely because it is distanced, mediated, and delayed.

The introduction to this volume advances its collective research agenda of renewing and advancing critical approaches to friendship and modern personal life. It outlines what a critical approach to friendship entails and delineates three central themes underlying debates in the social science literature on friendship: ideals, choice, and contexts. It both consolidates these debates and offers new directions for advancing them through a series of key interventions in critical approaches to friendship. These interventions are divided into the core thematic sections of the book: (1) critical intimacies, differences, and ruptures; (2) critical sociabilities beyond the private; and (3) critical relational junctures. The introduction also elucidates the thematic cohesion of the volume, emphasizing how the chapters are united by a commitment to ethnographic methods, interpretive theoretical approaches, and critical theory.

In most of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, short stories, and essays published between 1929 and 1949, London never quite registers as the same city from one work to the next. Bowen’s representations of London across her oeuvre are best characterised by their unceasing transformations, ever-morphing geographies, atmospheric shifts, and cosmopolitan bearings. Before she moved to a terrace house on Regent’s Park in 1935 with her husband Alan Cameron, her fiction, like Bowen herself, was London-adjacent. It registers in some of her early work as a city that broadcasts the dull enticements of ancestral obligation. Ingénues in these novels adapt this habit; they gaze at London from afar through the combined lenses of a vivid, though vague, literary imagination and a sluggish cultural legacy, or they conceive of it as a launchpad for a career as an artist. After 1935, and especially after her experiences of London during the blitz, Bowen’s perceptions of the city transform from immobile scenes of social paralysis towards the blistering desire for new, enthralling, and sometimes strange associations.

Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels display her lifelong preoccupation with disappointment, discord, and desire between mismatched lovers. Like their author, these characters seek genuine connection to remedy abandonment by beloved figures. This chapter uses ‘love’ in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing infatuation, sexual attraction, and unconsummated desire, as well as romantic and sexual attachment. Bowen’s keen awareness of social norms and customs shapes her plotting and foregrounds the complex interplay of private desires and public expectations. Three thematic strands dominate her portrayal of lovers: unrequited love, typically involving younger female protagonists and older, more experienced partners; transgressive love, for entanglements featuring characters who break taboos through their relationships; and illicit love, featuring secretive protagonists fearing exposure to public judgement. Across Bowen’s oeuvre, past lovers or previous relationships haunt the narrative present. Unrequited, transgressive, or illicit love might be buried or repressed, but ultimately it causes emotional disturbances for lovers in the present.

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

William James’s exquisite attention to thinking begins, by his own account, in what he learned from “the divine Emerson” about how cultivating the practice of carefully tailoring a habit of words to clothe a perception becomes itself a habit of mind. This habit of mind was trained for James, on “forg[ing] every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts” about being human in “the vast driftings of the cosmic weather.” What Emerson uncovered and James went on to investigate and assemble into his “mosaic philosophy” through his comprehensive study of physiology, neurology, wave theory, experimental psychology, and their related fields, is that in thinking, reading, imagining, and writing we are, in fact, experiencing quantum reality, as both Niels Bohr and Alfred North Whitehead recognized in the contribution of “that adorable genius.”

Coalescing developments in brain, mind, and body bring about qualitative changes in all aspects of the teenager’s life, with both great advantages and challenges. Being able to imagine how things could be, and seeing multiple possibilities, can lead to idealism or cynicism. Teens are aware of the complexity of thought and feeling and know that neither they nor others are always aware of motives. Along with a profound sense of uniqueness, they have the capacity to connect with others in a deeper, more intimate way and to be involved in a complex network of relationships. At the same time, they can feel alone in dealing with emotions at a new level of complexity. To thrive during this period they must be able to tolerate a level of vulnerability never before experienced, because they know others may be thinking about them and seeing beneath the surface of their behavior, just as they can.

This chapter foregrounds the silencing of the experiences of homosexuals under Nazi rule. It discusses the implications of Paragraph 175 of the criminal code and the legal definition of homosexual acts. It examines the way in which fear of persecution and police interrogations shaped the behavior of gay men, while some men maintained a gay lifestyle of sorts. Lesbians remained outside the formal scope of Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which covered only males.

The term lyric conjures many different things: musical language, emotional intensity, the qualities of ritual or prayer, introspection, and interiority. It has also come to designate a wide variety of spoken, sung, and printed poetic forms. This chapter explores Shelley’s relations to these ideas and forms through his reading and his writing. It also places Shelley’s writing in the context of modern and contemporary lyric theory, which investigates and expands the meaning of the term lyric and puts useful pressure on assumptions we might have about poetic voice, subjects, or speakers. In bringing these various contexts together, I suggest that none of them can wholly determine Shelleyan lyric, which is by turns formally constrained and politically engaged, intimate and impersonal.

This ethnography explores violence in relationships in Sierra Leone, using the ‘teeth and tongue’ metaphor to reveal the complex interplay between love and violence, particularly in gender dynamics. It examines how global agendas lead some states to extend regulatory control into intimacy, often perpetuating neo-colonial mechanisms. The study probes the clash between rigid state laws and the nuanced intricacies of lived experiences, analysing the impact of ostensibly impartial rights discourses. The book analyses the effects of external violence on relationships (Chapter 2), contemporary relationship dynamics in Freetown (Chapter 3), and critiques prevalent conceptualisations of love and violence phenomenologically (Chapters 4 and 5). It then examines the mediation and regulation of violence by households and communities (Chapter 6), state courts for adults (Chapter 7), and the legal treatment of minors (Chapter 8). The book traces the impact of new legislation on young men who were imprisoned and their partners (Chapter 9).