9781611688313

1611688310

9781611688320

1611688329

9781611688337

"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" - Provided by publisher.

"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.

Introduction: mapping marriage

Why marriage mattered then

Comparing rights, comparing stories

Making room for coquettes and fallen women

A postcolonial heroine "writes back"

Bungling bundling

Epilogue: why marriage matters now.

Literature, Modern > 18th century > History and criticism.

Literature, Modern > 19th century > History and criticism.

Man-woman relationships > Cross-cultural studies.

Companionate marriage > Cross-cultural studies.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Cross-cultural studies.