Product details
- ISBN 9781526188854
- Weight: 487g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 04 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.
Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society’s mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.
Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.
In an era that’s clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway…
