(Source: University of Virginia Press)
The University of Virginia Press has published
a new book on marriage in 18th century England.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In eighteenth-century England, the institution
of marriage became the subject of heated debates, as clerics, jurists,
legislators, philosophers, and social observers began rethinking its
contractual foundation. Public Vows argues that these debates
shaped English fiction in crucial and previously unrecognized ways and that
novels, in turn, played a central role in the debates.
Like many legal and social thinkers of their
day, novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Eliza
Fenwick, and Amelia Opie imagine marriage as a public institution subject to
regulation by church and state rather than a private agreement between two free
individuals. Through recurring scenes of infidelity, fraud, and coercion as
well as experiments with narrative form, these writers show the practical and
ethical problems that result when couples attempt to establish and dissolve
unions simply by exchanging consent. Even as novelists seek to shore up the
legal regulation of marriage, however, they contest the specific forms that
these regulations take.
In recovering novelists’ engagements with the
nuptial controversies of the Enlightenment, Public Vows challenges
longstanding accounts of domestic fiction as contributing to sharp divisions
between public and private life and as supporting the traditional, patriarchal
family. At the same time, the book counters received views of law and
literature, highlighting fiction’s often simultaneous affirmations and
critiques of legal authority.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Melissa J. Ganz
is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University.
More information here
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