New World Courtships
Subtitle: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage
Publisher: Dartmouth College
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781611688320
Subjects: Marriage in literature; Courtship in literature; Sex in literature; Man-woman relationships in literature; Literature, modern, history and criticism, 18th century; Man-woman relationships; Marriage
Description: "The first scholarly study to recover a geographically diverse array of eighteenth and nineteenth-century countertexts that actively compare culturally diverse marriage practices from Canada to the Caribbean" -

"Varieties of marriage in early American and British novels. Feminist literary critics have long recognized that the novel's marriage plot can shape the lives of women readers; however, they have largely traced the effects of this influence through a monolithic understanding of marriage. New World Courtships is the first scholarly study to recover a geographically diverse array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels that actively compare marriage practices from the Atlantic world. These texts trouble Enlightenment claims that companionate marriage leads to women's progress by comparing alternative systems for arranging marriage and sexual relations in the Americas. Attending to representations of marital diversity in early transatlantic novels disrupts nation-based accounts of the rise of the novel and its relation to 'the' marriage plot. It also illuminates how and why cultural differences in marriage mattered in the Atlantic world--and shows how these differences might help us to reimagine marital diversity today."--Back cover.