An emotional reading list

By Kristen LaRue-Sandler — February 11, 2025

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The Department of English at ASU shares this reading list honor of Valentine’s Day, or if you prefer—Galentine's, Palentine's, Black Love, or Singles Awareness Days. Segmented generally by topic and genre and listed in chronological order, these 30 books written or edited by our faculty plumb the depths of human emotion. Here, you’ll find tomes focusing on devotion, friendship, lust, romance, sex, and yes—love. Enjoy browsing our virtual bookshelf.

Cultural, literary and media analyses

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western (University of Nebraska Press, 2025)

Edited by Instructor Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush and Sara L. Spurgeon, this collection dives into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion (Routledge, 2022)

Edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Lalita Pandit Hogan and Associate Professor Bradley Irish, this is a guide to new, interdisciplinary understandings of emotion and affect — in fields from neuroscience to social theory — and how those understandings are changing the study of literature.

Lady Chatterley's Legacy in the Movies: Sex, Brains, and Body Guys (Rutgers University Press, 2010)

Written by Professor Emeritus Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt, a study of the "body guy" genre in film—in which a working-class man-of-the-earth or bohemian artist awakens and fulfills the sexuality of a beautiful, intelligent woman frequently married or engaged to a sexually incompetent, educated, upper-class man.

Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art (Yale University Press, 2009)

This book by Professor Emeritus Judith Sensibar explores how the themes of race, tormented love and addiction that permeated William Faulkner’s fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships with women.

Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads (Lexington Books, 2008)

Edited by Foundation Professor Neal A. Lester and Professor Emeritus Maureen Daly Goggin, this collection of essays explores how complex intersections among the social categories of race, gender and sexuality within personal ads reveal a dynamic tapestry of power relations and hierarchies.

Fiction and memoir

‘Artless Tales: Or, Romantic Effusions of the Heart’ by Anna Maria Porter (Juvenilia Press, 2023)

Edited by Erika Cleveland, Regents Professor Devoney Looser, Claire McCarville and A. J. Otero, this was the second book of short stories (both called "Artless Tales") that Anna Maria Porter published. With surprising sophistication, she creates brave, risk-taking heroines, who face loss and danger on the road to love and marriage to worthy heroes.

‘Rivall Friendship’ by Bridget Manningham (ACMRS Press, 2023)

Edited by Professor Emeritus Jean R. Brink, this book is a post–English Civil War romance that examines proto-feminist issues, such as patriarchal dominance in the family and marriage.

‘Sense and Sensibility’ by Jane Austen (Penguin, 2019)

This "deluxe" edition with commentary and introduction by Regents Professor Devoney Looser tells the timeless story of sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, who learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.

Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies (Soft Skull Press, 2015)

Winner of the 2015 PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction, this book by Professor Tara Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex and love.

‘A Gossip's Story’ by Jane West (Valancourt Books, 2015)

Edited by Regents Professor Devoney Looser, Melinda O'Connell and Caitlin Kelly, this edition of a wryly humorous cautionary tale from the late eighteenth century — its themes of courtship and love, money and romance, filial piety and financial ruin — centers on two very different sisters.

Aucassin and Nicolette: A Facing-Page Edition and Translation (Michigan State University Press, 2015)

Edited and translated by Professor Emeritus Robert Sturges, this masterpiece of medieval French literature is both a classic romantic comedy and an entertaining parody of the romance genre.

Palmerino (Bellevue Literary Press, 2013)

This work of historical fiction by Professor Emeritus Melissa Pritchard brings to life a vividly detailed, subtly erotic tale about secret loves and the fascinating artists and intellectuals — Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Robert Browning, Bernard Berenson — who challenged and inspired each other during an age of repression.

Rockaway: A Novel (Soft Skull Press, 2013)

Tracing the relationship between a painter and a musician, this novel by Professor Tara Ison is a time capsule love letter to a quirky, singular town, in a time before the events of September 2001 and the later devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

The List: A Novel (Scribner, 2011)

This novel by Professor Tara Ison is an irreverent, sophisticated take on the classic breakup story.

The Gateway: Stories (Southern Methodist University, 2007)

This collection of stories by Professor Emeritus T. M. McNally goes a long way toward answering this age-old question: “Why do fools fall in love?” Here are seven answers, each beguiling and break-neck and bedeviling.

Bittersweet: A Candid Love Story (Acacia Publishing, 2006)

This memoir by the late Professor Emeritus Helen Nebeker is a courageously honest story of love, of hate, of joy, of hardship, of success, of loss. Based partly on nearly 800 letters written between the author and her husband following his deployment to the WWII European front, it is the story of two people who survive — together and apart — 57 years of marriage.

Late Bloomer: A Novel (Anchor, 2005)

This novel by Professor Emeritus Melissa Pritchard follows Prudence True Parker on her madcap journey as a college professor-turned-romance novelist, as she finds her real life surpassing the wildest flights of her imagination.

Historical perspectives

The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature (Routledge, 2024)

This study by Associate Professor Bradley Irish — the first full-length study of envy and jealousy in Renaissance England — introduces readers both to the cultural dynamics of affective rivalry in the period and to how these crucial feelings inspired literary works across a wide range of genres.

Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2021)

Edited by Associate Professor Cora Fox, Cassie M. Miura and Associate Professor Bradley J. Irish, includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity and tranquility.

Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s (Duke University Press, 2020)

By Associate Professor Jed Samer, an exploration of how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. 

Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Northwestern University Press, 2018)

Spanning literature of the sixteenth century, this book by Associate Professor Bradley Irish argues that emotionality is a foundational framework through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, and thus can serve as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis.

Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Through intertextual readings in diverse cultural contexts, this study by Associate Professor Cora Fox reveals the ways that Ovidian characterizations helped redefine emotions and the political efficacy of emotional expression in sixteenth-century England.

Dialogue and Deviance: Male-Male Desire in the Dialogue Genre (Plato to the Middle Ages, Plato to the Enlightenment, Plato to the Postmodern) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

This book by Professor Emeritus Robert Sturges traces the historical relationship between male-male erotic desire and the genre of literary or philosophical dialogue.

Poetry

Instead, It Is Dark: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2023)

In this collection, the personal is alchemized as Professor Emeritus Cynthia Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and―the heart of this collection―love.

I Cry Love! Love! Love!: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2021)

This collection by Professor Emeritus Randel Helms inscribes the word “love” in 22 of its 33 poems. They celebrate delights of being in a body. But not just sex — love of God, of friends, parents, children, pets, poems, even food, all are savored.

Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book of poems by Professor Natalie Diaz is an anthem of desire against erasure. Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages — bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers — be touched and held as beloveds.

The Theater of Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)

This poetry collection by Regents Professor Alberto Ríos is filled with magic, marvel, and emotional truth. Set along the elusive Mexican-American border, his poems trace the lives and loves of an elderly couple, Clemente and Ventura, through their childhood and courtship to marriage, maturity, old age, and death.

Psychological and linguistic studies

The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

This Element by Associate Professor Bradley Irish surveys how a number of major disciplines have addressed the long-standing research question of whether human emotions should be thought of as meaningfully "universal." The book presents both the universalist and anti-universalist positions, and concludes by considering attempts to move beyond this increasingly unhelpful binary.

Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (John Benjamins, 2016)

This volume edited by Associate Professor Matthew Prior and Gabriele Kasper brings together a collection of studies that investigates how multilingual speakers construct emotions in their talk as a joint discursive practice. The volume addresses itself to students and researchers interested in language and emotion, multilingual speakers and settings, pragmatics and discourse analysis.

Emotion and Discourse in L2 Narrative Research (Multilingual Matters, 2015)

Associate Professor Matthew Prior examines the interactional management of emotionality in second-language autobiographical interview research. This interdisciplinary book will be compelling reading for students, researchers and others interested in emotion, narrative, discourse, identity, interaction, interviews and qualitative research.