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Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

Book

Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

DOI link for Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

Dickens and the Rise of Divorce book

The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition

Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

DOI link for Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

Dickens and the Rise of Divorce book

The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition
ByKelly Hager
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2010
eBook Published 19 April 2016
Pub. Location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315577050
Pages 216
eBook ISBN 9781315577050
Subjects Language & Literature, Law
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Hager, K. (2010). Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315577050

ABSTRACT

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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|44 pages

Contextualizing the Failed-Marriage Plot: Ian Watt, the Domestic Novel, and the Law of Marriage

chapter 2|36 pages

Monstrous Marriage in Early Dickens

chapter 3|40 pages

Making a Spectacle of Yourself, or, Marriage as Melodrama in

chapter 4|24 pages

Estranging David Copperfield

chapter 5|28 pages

Hard Times and the Indictment of Marriage

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