Love in a Time of Allegory

Following the acclaim of In Most Tides an Island (2018) and Lacuna Park (2021), Love in the Time of Allegory is the latest book by Nicholas Muellner, a leading figure in the image-text f ield and founding director of the MFA Image Text program at Cornell University Created in an era of authoritarian resurgence, ecological precarity, and displacement, the book uses allegory to explore how desire and intimacy persist within lives shaped by public crisis, resonating deeply with our fractured present This richly illustrated essay combines critical thinking with photography, bringing together fragments – dream-like stories, portraits, reflective prose – to refuse a purity of genre Love in a Time of Allegory asks how we can still feel, desire, and imagine in an age of relentless realism. Moving between images and text, Nicholas Muellner’s illustrated essay turns to allegory as a way of thinking through politics, love, and meaning when private life is inseparable from public crisis. Haunted by political and ecological anxiety and by the erosion of shared truths, Muellner argues that realism jeopardises our capacity to imagine the world as anything other than it already is, asking how fiction and metaphor might open other ways of seeing. The book unfolds as a meditation on desire and belief, on how intimacy persists within disillusionment, and how emotion becomes a form of resistance. Drawing on histories of art, literature, and philosophy, Muellner proposes that allegory, like love, keeps open the possibility of connection in a fractured world. Love and allegory resist the flattening of experience, insisting that imagination remains a radical, collaborative act capable of transforming even the most precarious realities into tenderness and hope.