Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important
genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means
something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian
novels, women may marry for erotic desire-but they might, instead,
insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who
can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work.
Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of
female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century,
while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea. Undertaking a
major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson
through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the
novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This
alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen,
the Brontes, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's
popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a
feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's
point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might
legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For
the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire,
individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's
Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning
for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons
for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction. Comprehensive in
its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel,
Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the
nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in
helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing
ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
