Romance''s Rival - Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction

Challenging conventional understandings of the marriage plot in Victorian fiction, Romance's Rival re-reads classic novels by Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and others to shed new light on the consistent tension between erotic desire and familiar security in the love matches that occur throughout the period's fiction.

List of contents

• Acknowledgements


• Preface


• Chapter 1: Theorizing Victorian Marriage


• Chapter 2: Historicizing Marriage, Developing the Marriage Plot


• Chapter 3: Neighbor Marriage: Loving the Squire


• Chapter 4: Cousin Marriage: Reading on the Contrary


• Chapter 5: Disability Marriage: Communities of Care in the Victorian Novel


• Chapter 6: Vocational Marriage, or, Why Marriage Doesn't Work


• Bibliography


• Index

About the author

Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011), and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (OUP 2001).

Summary

Challenging conventional understandings of the marriage plot in Victorian fiction, Romance's Rival re-reads classic novels by Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and others to shed new light on the consistent tension between erotic desire and familiar security in the love matches that occur throughout the period's fiction.

Additional text

The subject matter of this impeccably researched, clearly written work is so compelling that the book will interest readers outside as well as inside the academy. The book will definitely influence how this reviewer teaches some of her favorite novels in the future. Essential.

Product details

• Authors: Talia Schaffer, Talia (Professor of English Schaffer, Schaffer Talia
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.01.2019
• EAN: 9780190887414
• ISBN: 978-0-19-088741-4
• No. of pages: 352
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form