New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage

by Melissa M. Adams-Campbell

Overview

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. This book will appeal to scholars of literature, women’s studies, and early American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611688337
Publisher:	Dartmouth College Press
Publication date:	10/22/2015
Series:	Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

MELISSA M. ADAMS-CAMPBELL is an assistant professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments • 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 • Notes • Bibliography • Index

What People are Saying About This

Duncan Faherty

“New World Courtships teaches us new ways to think about the relationship between cultural formation and the marriage plot, and it provocatively revises our sense of how (and why) the marriage plot functions in a new world context. This is an innovative project, and it will assuredly have a lasting impact on the field of early US literary studies.”

Editorial Reviews

“New World Courtships is an engaging, insightful analysis of the possibilities raised in transatlantic texts by cross-cultural interaction and a model of the scholarly potential for comparative methodology. . . . The transatlantic alternatives and comparative possibilities examined in New World Courtships are an important illustration of the long-standing diversity of marital practice and discourse.”
—Early American Literature


“New World Courtships is thought-provoking and original. . . . Adams-Campbell’s material is stimulating.”

—Nineteenth Century Studies

From the Publisher