The Heresy of Self-Love: A Study of Subversive Individualism

Originally published in 1968 and reissued now with a new preface and conclusion, this work explores versions of Narcissus that have powerfully shaped the attitudes of our culture. Ranging from the Gnostics of the second century A.D. through mediaeval mysticism, courtly love, Tristan and Isolde, Skakespeare's Sonnets, Milton, Descartes, Spinoza, and Rousseau' to Kierkegaard, Herman Melville, Boudelaire, de Tocqueville, Marx, and the contemporary world, Paul Zweig atempts to dramatize and clarify this experience to self-cultivation and self-exaltation. --- from book's back cover