A01=Kelly Hager
Author_Kelly Hager
betsey
Betsey Trotwood
British novel analysis
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
copperfield
courtship
Courtship Plot
coverture doctrine
Curiosity Shop
david
David Copperfield
Desert Mr Micawber
Edith Dombey
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
failed
Failed Marriage Plot
gender reform discourse
Jack Maldon
Lady Dedlock
legal history of marriage in novels
marriage
marriage law history
Matrimonial Cruelty
Melodramatic Mode
mercenary
Mercenary Marriage
Mr Wickfield
Mrs Bagnet
Mrs Gradgrind
Mrs Jarley
Mrs Quilp
Mrs Snagsby
Mrs Sparsit
nicholas
plot
proto-feminism studies
Pure Fabulation
Sir Leicester
trotwood
Victorian literature
Watt's Thesis
Waxwork Figure
Wedded Lock
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754669470
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 17 Mar 2010
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Questioning a literary history that, since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, has privileged the courtship plot, Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager maps the legal history of marriage and divorce, providing crucial background as she reveals the prevalence of the failed-marriage plot in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels. Dickens's novels emerge as representative case studies in their preoccupations with the disintegration of marriage, the far-reaching and disastrous effects of the doctrine of coverture, and the comic, spectacular, and monstrous possibilities afforded by the failed-marriage plot. Setting his narratives alongside the writings of liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill and the seemingly conservative agendas of Caroline Norton, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Sarah Stickney Ellis, Hager also offers a more contextualized account of the competing strands of the Woman Question. In the course of her revisionist readings of Dickens's novels, Hager uncovers a Dickens who is neither the conservative agent of the patriarchy nor a novelistic Jeremy Bentham, and reveals that tipping the marriage plot on its head forces us to adjust our understanding of the complexities of Victorian proto-feminism.
Kelly Hager is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Simmons College, USA.
