The love story of Cupid and Psyche, the powerful god of love and a human girl, has fascinated readers for centuries, ever since it was written by the Roman author Apuleius in the second century AD. The enchanting story can be read as both the origin of many classic fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella, and as a philosophical portrait of the search of the human soul for the divine.

The story of Cupid and Psyche is first known through the Latin novel Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass by the second-century AD writer Apuleius--one of the few Latin fictions from Roman antiquity to have survived in its entirety. Apuleius in European Literature: Cupid and Psyche since 1650 examines the reception of the long two-book romantic story of Cupid and Psyche in European literature from 1650 to the present day, with some attention also devoted to fine art and opera ...