{"id":2191401,"date":"2026-10-11T06:22:30","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T03:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2191401"},"modified":"2026-10-11T06:22:30","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T03:22:30","slug":"history-of-heartbreak-exhibition-opens-in-oxford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2191401","title":{"rendered":"History of heartbreak exhibition opens in Oxford"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/1024\/branded_news\/3785\/live\/66a14a20-c3d6-11f1-95ba-dba767ffba7e.jpg”]<\/p>\n

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\"GettyGetty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Rick and Ilsa’s farewell in the big-screen classic Casablanca is one of pop cultures most gut-wrenching heartbreaks<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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From Rick and Ilsa’s final farewell in Casablanca to Adele singing Someone Like You – heartbreak has been at the heart of popular culture for much of the last century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But the pain is just about as old as human’s themselves. For thousands of years it has provided inspiration for tales of woe and even cause for medical enquiries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A new exhibition in Oxford is attempting to chart some of that history – tracing back to uncover how people in the past valued, expressed, and tried to recover from the anguish of heartbreak.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After Love, at the OVADA Gallery in the city centre, has been compiled and organised by Sally Holloway, who is a a historian of emotions at the University of Warwick.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“It’s something that as a society, we need to be talking about more and we need to be taking it much more seriously,” Holloway said of the exhibition’s subject matter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“What I really want to convey with this project is that heartbreak wasn’t just a sort of serious physical threat for people in the past, but it can be today too.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"SallySally Holloway<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Dr Sally Holloway is a historian of emotions at the University of Warwick<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The exhibition in Oxford charts the evolution of lost love over the past 400 years, and what that now looks like in 2026.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“I started planning out my next book project and thinking about perhaps I could do something on heartbreak,” Holloway said of her latest work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“As soon as I decided this, I felt like I became the repository for other people’s stories of heartbreak – suddenly everybody was coming to me with their own individual story of a breakup, a romantic loss.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“I realised then that I was onto something that happened in the past which had real resonance for people in the present.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"GettyGetty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Tales of heartbreak date back millennia, with the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice one of the most famous<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The gallery features more than a hundred different works in a various mediums, including film, sculpture and collage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“I’m starting in early modern England and tracing the changing ways that heartbreak was experienced and understood and valued right through to the present day,” Holloway explained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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She said the project was “thinking about all the different feelings involved to show really that heartbreak was more than grief”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“For early modern people, the healthy body was a body that was was balanced – so if you were heartbroken you might be experiencing an excess of sadness.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“[It was thought] that sort of degree of emotional strain could cause your heartstrings to literally snap.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“Whereas, by the 18th century heartbroken people spoke of heartbreak more in terms of it was sort of the loss of the meaning of their life.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“Then in the 19th century, people increasingly figured their heartbreak in terms of things like misery and trouble and feelings of shame.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"ReutersReuters<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Adele’s early albums featured plenty of ballads tackling the anguish of lost love<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The After Love exhibition at Oxford’s OVADA Gallery opened this week, and runs every Thursday to Sunday until 18 October.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Holloway said she had “learned a lot” from working with the more than 50 artists artists involved in the presentation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“In some ways, heartbreak is an opportunity because it’s such a great rupture with the past that it provides that opportunity to look ahead at your own future and ask ‘who am I now and what should I do next?’,” she added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/ckvgd67y7n4do”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/1024\/branded_news\/3785\/live\/66a14a20-c3d6-11f1-95ba-dba767ffba7e.jpg”] Getty Images Rick and Ilsa’s farewell in the big-screen classic Casablanca is one of pop cultures most gut-wrenching heartbreaks From Rick and Ilsa’s final farewell in Casablanca to Adele singing Someone Like You – heartbreak has been at the heart of popular culture for much of the last century. But the pain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[35,226],"class_list":["post-2191401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-bbc-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2191401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2191401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2191401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2191401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2191401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2191401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}