Following the acclaim of In Most Tides an Island (2018) andLacuna Park (2021), Love in the Time of Allegory is the latestbook by Nicholas Muellner, a leading figure in the image-text field and founding director of the MFA Image Text program atCornell UniversityCreated in an era of authoritarian resurgence, ecological precarity,and displacement, the book uses allegory to explore how desireand intimacy persist within lives shaped by public crisis, resonatingdeeply with our fractured presentThis richly illustrated essay combines critical thinking withphotography, bringing together fragments – dream-like stories,portraits, reflective prose – to refuse a purity of genreLove in a Time of Allegory asks how we can still feel, desire, and imagine in anage of relentless realism. Moving between images and text, Nicholas Muellner’sillustrated essay turns to allegory as a way of thinking through politics, love, andmeaning 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 asanything other than it already is, asking how fiction and metaphor might openother ways of seeing. The book unfolds as a meditation on desire and belief, onhow intimacy persists within disillusionment, and how emotion becomes a formof resistance.Drawing on histories of art, literature, and philosophy, Muellner proposes thatallegory, like love, keeps open the possibility of connection in a fractured world.Love and allegory resist the flattening of experience, insisting that imaginationremains a radical, collaborative act capable of transforming even the mostprecarious realities into tenderness and hope.
