Primitive Marriage - Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity

What happens when another genre of writing lays claim to the novel's traditional subject of marriage? This book shows how anthropology gave late-Victorian novelists and social scientists ways of rethinking heterosexual romance by referring to a new kind of history of marriage systems, sexual behavior, and reproductive practices.

List of contents

• Acknowledgements


• Introduction: Sexualizing modernity


• 1: Sexualizing economic modernity: Property and exchange in The Eustace Diamonds


• 2: Sexualizing political modernity: Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, and the sexual contract


• 3: Aestheticizing sexual modernity: Darwinian aesthetics and eugenics


• 4: Sexualizing intellectual modernity: Mythic marriage in She and Tess of the d'Urbervilles


• Conclusion: After Primitive Marriage


• References


• Index

About the author

Kathy Alexis Psomiades is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She received her PhD from Yale University and previously taught at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (1997) and co-editor with Talia Schaffer of Women and British Aestheticism (1999).

Summary

What happens when another genre of writing lays claim to the novel's traditional subject of marriage? This book shows how anthropology gave late-Victorian novelists and social scientists ways of rethinking heterosexual romance by referring to a new kind of history of marriage systems, sexual behavior, and reproductive practices.

Product details

• Authors: Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Kathy Alexis (Associate Professor of En Psomiades, Psomiades Kathy Alexis
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.04.2023
• EAN: 9780192863720
• ISBN: 978-0-19-286372-0
• No. of pages: 250
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Anthropology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, 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