Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure on stage as conductor, composer, pianist, and media persona, and off stage, too, in his physicality, sociality, charisma, and sensuous engagement with the world. His artistic and celebrity status granted wide berth to Bernstein’s ‘bohemian’ sexual and relationship practices, but he was not exempt from contemporary social expectations and anxieties. Indeed, Bernstein’s life and career illustrate the pivotal effects of twentieth-century sociosexual norms and homophobia on US musical modernism. A gay man in a heterosexual marriage, Bernstein was both a victim and beneficiary, and a sometime agent, of homophobia. In Bernstein the forces of twentieth-century homophobia converged with talent, ambition, and repression, yielding momentous results for his family, intimates, colleagues, and rivals, and for US and international arts and culture. Bernstein’s life and career were fatefully shaped by prevailing social forms and mores, and ultimately his social and cultural influence would contribute to their reshaping.

“Dear John” letters have loomed large in American war-lore ever since GIs first coined the phrase in World War II. Receiving a break-up note from a wife, fiancée, or girlfriend has come to appear a rite of passage for men in uniform. The motif of female treachery and male tragedy circulates both in the stories servicemen and veterans tell one another and in US culture more broadly – in pop music, movies, and novels. Yet no prior author has devoted a book to the “Dear John” phenomenon. That virtually no bona fide specimens exist in archival collections helps explain this lacuna. But the fact that so many “Dear Johns” were physically destroyed soon after receipt doesn‘t make these letters impossible to study. Instead of regarding Dear Johns as a female-authored epistolary genre, we should conceive these letters as the product of a male vernacular tradition. Men have told us most of what we know about how and why women composed these letters, and the effects they‘ve had on recipients. This book explores the interplay between letter-writing and story-telling, inviting readers to contemplate why love is so hard to sustain in wartime.

Parnell haunts the city in James Joyce’s Dubliners. An admonishing ghost, he tantalizes its citizens with the abandoned dreams that follow Ireland’s rejection of their lost leader to  the warnings and strictures of the Roman Catholic Church following his adultery with Katherine O’Shea. James Duffy, at the centre of the story A Painful Case, is one such individual, searching for his sexual, spiritual, and political solace. A devotee of classical music, he meets the married Mrs Emily Sinico at a concert. What develops shakes Duffy to his soul for he recoils from her physical show of affection. They separate. A short while later he reads of her suicide, intoxicated, throwing herself before a train. Throughout the story strange echoes and eerie parallels between the fall of Parnell and the fall of James Duffy deepen the confusion and tragedies of both men, and of the Ireland that shaped their connected fates.

This chapter provides a thorough survey of the theme of heterosexual love in the fragments of Euripides, demonstrating how many of these plays – particularly Andromeda, Oedipus, Protesilaus and Antigone – offer glimpses of a different permutation of tragic marriage. These plays dramatise marital or premarital relationships in which the female partner could play an active and sometimes assertive role, and which, even when placed within dramatic contexts that render the union itself problematic, may be termed reciprocal and even romantic.The widening of the scope of enquiry demonstrates that the more positive portrayal of spousal bonds that we find in Euripides’ Helen is not an anomaly within the genre: tragic marriage did not always have to be portrayed a site of friction and disaster, and in fact it was some of Euripides’ most overtly erotic and romantic plays that left a distinctive mark on their original and later audiences.