Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition

by Kelly Hager

Overview

Since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, the history of prose fiction has privileged the courtship plot. Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager's alternative history is richly contextualized in the legal history of marriage and divorce, enabling her to offer a fuller account of competing strands of the Woman Question and revisionist readings of Dickens's novels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781409475736
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	04/28/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Kelly Hager is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Simmons College, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Chapter 1 Contextualizing the Failed-Marriage Plot; Chapter 2 Monstrous Marriage in Early Dickens; Chapter 3 Making a Spectacle of Yourself, or, Marriage as Melodrama in Dombey and Son; Chapter 4 Estranging David Copperfield; Chapter 5 Hard Times and the Indictment of Marriage; Chapter 101 Epilogue;