Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition

Kelly Hager (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

216 Seiten

2017
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-138-26224-9 (ISBN)

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Questioning a literary history that, since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, has privileged the courtship plot, Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager maps the legal history of marriage and divorce, providing crucial background as she reveals the prevalence of the failed-marriage plot in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels. Dickens's novels emerge as representative case studies in their preoccupations with the disintegration of marriage, the far-reaching and disastrous effects of the doctrine of coverture, and the comic, spectacular, and monstrous possibilities afforded by the failed-marriage plot. Setting his narratives alongside the writings of liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill and the seemingly conservative agendas of Caroline Norton, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Sarah Stickney Ellis, Hager also offers a more contextualized account of the competing strands of the Woman Question. In the course of her revisionist readings of Dickens's novels, Hager uncovers a Dickens who is neither the conservative agent of the patriarchy nor a novelistic Jeremy Bentham, and reveals that tipping the marriage plot on its head forces us to adjust our understanding of the complexities of Victorian proto-feminism.

Kelly Hager is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Simmons College, USA.

Introduction; Chapter 1 Contextualizing the Failed-Marriage Plot; Chapter 2 Monstrous Marriage in Early Dickens; Chapter 3 Making a Spectacle of Yourself, or, Marriage as Melodrama in Dombey and Son; Chapter 4 Estranging David Copperfield; Chapter 5 Hard Times and the Indictment of Marriage; Chapter 101 Epilogue;

Erscheinungsdatum	04.03.2017
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	453 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
	Recht / Steuern ► Privatrecht / Bürgerliches Recht ► Sachenrecht
	Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-138-26224-2 / 1138262242
ISBN-13	978-1-138-26224-9 / 9781138262249
Zustand	Neuware