New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage [Paperback]

Feminist literary critics have long recognized that the novels marriage plot can shape the lives of women readers; however, they have largely traced the effects of this influence through a monolithic understanding of marriage. New World Courtships is the first scholarly study to recover a geographically diverse array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels that actively compare marriage practices from the Atlantic world. These texts trouble Enlightenment claims that companionate marriage leads to womens progress by comparing alternative systems for arranging marriage and sexual relations in the Americas. Attending to representations of marital diversity in early transatlantic novels disrupts nation-based accounts of the rise of the novel and its relation to the marriage plot. It also illuminates how and why cultural differences in marriage mattered in the Atlantic worldand shows how these differences might help us to reimagine marital diversity today. This book will appeal to scholars of literature, womens studies, and early American history.

MELISSA M. ADAMS-CAMPBELL is an assistant professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Mapping Marriage Why Marriage Mattered Then Comparing Rights, Comparing Stories Making Room for Coquettes and Fallen Women A Postcolonial Heroine Writes Back Bungling Bundling Epilogue: Why Marriage Matters Now Notes Bibliography Index