The history of love and the history of literature are impossible to separate. Most famous lovers are fictional; only occasionally are real people—Antony and Cleopatra, say—elevated to the erotic pantheon, and then typically as a result of literature. Genres and forms crystalize around love: the romance, the aubade, the Petrarchan sonnet, the marriage plot. It’s not surprising, then, that some of the most ambitious accounts of literary history have turned on the representation of eroticism, such as C.S. Lewis’s classic study, The Allegory of Love, which covered half a millennium of the European literary tradition.
Still, with one exception, it’s hard to think of an argument quite as far-reaching as that of a relatively recent paper, “The Cultural Evolution of Love in Literary History” (2022). The thesis is simple: as societies get richer and denser, they produce more fiction, and more of it is about love. Others have made the basic connection between love and economics before. Friedrich Engels—the exception in question—argued that different forms of eroticism developed in response to economic conditions in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. (Engels, for what it’s worth, thought that marriage would eventually disappear in favor of serial monogamy.) More recently, the French historian Georges Duby connected medieval economic growth and love literature in Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages. But the authors of “The Cultural Evolution of Love in Literary History,” Nicholas Baumard, Elise Huillery, Alexandre Hyafil and Lou Safra, are the first to make it into a testable claim.
On the whole, their results are convincing: they make a strong case that density and wealth are not only correlated with the composition of love literature, but actually tend to cause it. The first part of the claim isn’t especially surprising. It stands to reason that literary eroticism can only take root in rich societies where people are clustered together. After all, while storytelling is fundamental to all societies and classes, for most of human history, only the leisured minority had the time to read, much less to write, long, intricate works. More surprising is the fact that literary culture seems almost inevitably to become amorous once the conditions are right. In wealthy cities, to borrow a phrase from Tennyson, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”
There are some interesting implications to this idea, not only for thinking about how literature developed, but also for what it, at its core, is. We could think of written, imaginative fictions as a way to imagine forms of intimacy in complex societies, where bonds are chosen and negotiated rather than given. We could even think of them as helping to bring those bonds into existence, or at least as providing a template that shapes how men and women view their own increasingly contingent and variable interpersonal relationships.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s precisely how scholars have described a wide range of literary forms. In the Renaissance, for example, the Petrarch sonnet is often discussed as a form that enables psychological exploration through its representation of passionate love. The rise of the novel in the eighteenth century is often connected to its rich depictions of sociability and its individualistic psychology, especially where questions of courtship or seduction are concerned. But we gain something by thinking about all of these genres as part of a single, longer story of intertwined economic and cultural change. Rather than a succession of individual points, we can imagine a continuous progression: a throughline that takes us from the poems of Catullus to the novels of George Eliot, with some strange twists and turns along the way.
And not just from Catullus to Eliot, but also from Rumi to Cao Xueqin: looking at literature in these terms helps to explain why so much of Eurasia seems to be more or less on the same literary timetable. When a friend sent me a link to this article, I had been thinking about why late Ming literature felt so much like the literature of my own period of research, the European Renaissance. It struck me as strange that an erotic masterpiece like The Plum in the Golden Vase could date to the same decade, the 1590s, as Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, before there could have been any direct cultural transmission between the two regions. (It’s true that the eroticism in question is very different: Shakespeare isn’t particularly interested in feet, and there’s only very occasional cross dressing in The Plum in the Golden Vase.) I had been wondering if post-plague population recovery could be a factor—after all, Eurasia shared microbes before it shared texts. The authors of this paper give us a hypothesis that can, I think, still be incorporated into the picture of two continents experiencing an era of exuberant, erotic aesthetics in the wake of their recovery from a period of demographic crisis.
In the two years since it’s been published, “The Cultural Evolution of Love in Literary History” has received 56 citations. None, so far as I can tell, have been by literary scholars. But there is a lot that this paper, and others like it, have to offer literary studies—and, as Baumard et al. recognize, vice versa. Not because literary scholars should adopt its methods: the authors are cognitive scientists working in the field of cultural evolution and, as one would expect from their field, their argument is a view from 10,000 feet. But it does raise the kind of questions that can and should feed back into literary interpretation. Just to name a few: if richer, more urban societies produce more romantic fiction, do we see similar divisions within classes of the same society? Do crises such as pandemics, wars, or severe economic depressions, temporarily suppress literary eroticism? Since much, though by no means all, love plots involve heterosexual pairings, should we expect to see more women in literature as societies get richer? How does the increasing importance of love to literature change non-erotic genres, such as the heroic? To put it another way, is Antony and Cleopatra, with its double plot of love and war, an allegory of literary history?