Romance's Rival (Paperback)

Talia Schaffer

ISBN 10: 0190887419 / ISBN 13: 9780190887414

Editore: Oxford University Press Inc, New York, 2019

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Paperback. 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 expressesideas 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, fromRichardson 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 forsomething 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 theyearning 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. Challenging conventional understandings of the marriage plot in Victorian fiction, Romance's Rival re-reads classic novels by Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and others to shed new light on the consistent tension between erotic desire and familiar security in the love matches that occur throughout the period's fiction. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.

Codice articolo 9780190887414

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Romance's Rival (Paperback)
• Editore: Oxford University Press Inc, New York
• Data di pubblicazione: 2019
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0190887419
• ISBN 13: 9780190887414
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: new

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

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 Brontës, 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.

Informazioni sull'autore

Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011), and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (OUP 2001).