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A revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability.Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of toleration.Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women authors reframe the questions posed by Grandison, representing intimacy, authorship, and women's religious subjectivity in ways that challenge the social and political norms of Protestant British culture. She concludes with reflections on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the costs of a marriage plot that insists on religious conformity. By examining the complex epistemologies of the interfaith marriage plot, Sacred Engagements counters the secularization thesis that has long dominated eighteenth-century novel studies. In so doing, the book recognizes those subjects otherwise ignored by liberal political theory and extrapolates how a genuinely inclusive tolerance might be imagined in our own deeply divided times.

With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot. Thus, novels that feature romantic doctors almost invariably deny the authority of empiricism, as is the case in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart. In contrast, works such as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, which highlight clinically minded or even sinister doctors, uphold the determining logic of science and, in turn, threaten the novel's romantic plot. By focusing on the figure of the doctor rather than on a scientific theme or medical field, Sparks emulates the Victorian novel's personalization of tropes and belief systems, using the realism associated with the doctor to chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel's central imaginative structure, the marriage plot. As the doctors Sparks examines increasingly stand in for the encroachment of empirical knowledge on a morally formulated artistic genre, their alienation from the marriage plot and its interrelated decline succinctly herald the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of Modernism.

Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Book InCovert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas-confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse-Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the \"Parson's Tale,\" the \"Miller's Tale,\" theSecretum Secretorum, andSir Gawain and the Green Knightas well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past-and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.

The public fascination with Sylvia Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes is an integral part of the American writer’s legacy, one that is constantly reinterpreted by new generations of critics. The publication, in 2018, of Sylvia Plath’s previously unknown correspondence revealed new aspects of one of her most influential relationships – her marriage to English poet Ted Hughes. My aim is to explore the articulation of this biographical element as an essential part of the mythology surrounding her life and work.

Framing the Christian defense of marital monogamy against Ephesians 5's suggestion that all believers are married in Christ, this book argues for the presence of competing marriage theologies in four Shakespeare plays: The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter's Tale.

This article examines Israel Zangwill's 1908 play The Melting-Pot as a document in American immigration history, and the role of its most contested tropes – interfaith marriage and the melting-pot itself – in his efforts to rescue suffering Jews of Europe. Through close readings of the play and with reference to other works by Zangwill in the early twentieth century, the article looks at the play as a pragmatic work in a time of international upheaval and American nativism. A discussion of the play's reception by critics and audiences indicates that what was most controversial at the time of its production was not necessarily what Zangwill was most desirous to convey. But a look at its varied meanings over time reveals the persistence of the melting-pot metaphor in discussions of immigration, identity, ethnicity and nationhood, especially in the American imaginary.

The Tale of Genji (ca. 1008), by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, is known for its sophisticated renderings of fictional characters’ minds and its critical perspectives on the lives of the aristocracy of eleventh-century Japan. Unreal Houses radically rethinks the Genji by focusing on the figure of the house. Edith Sarra examines the narrative’s fictionalized images of aristocratic mansions and its representation of the people who inhabit them, exploring how key characters in the Genji think about houses in both the architectural and genealogical sense of the word. Through close readings of the Genji and other Heian narratives, Unreal Houses elucidates the literary fabrication of social, architectural, and affective spaces and shows how the figure of the house contributes to the structuring of narrative sequences and the expression of relational nuances among fictional characters. Combining literary analysis with the history of gender, marriage, and the built environment, Sarra opens new perspectives on the architectonics of the Genji and the feminine milieu that midwifed what some have called the world’s first novel.

Lelia's Kissanalyzes gender roles, sexuality, and marriage in the Italian Renaissance through the lens of a large number of comedies from the period, ranging well beyond the traditional canon

Ruth Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century including the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the 'rise' of the middle class, and the development of print culture. In particular, Perry traces the shift from a kinship orientation based on blood relations to a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties as it is revealed in popular literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women's position in families. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and many others. This important study by a leading eighteenth-century scholar will be of interest to social and literary historians.

\"I cannot suppose any situation more distressing than for a woman of sensibility with an improving mind to be bound to such a man as I have described.\" Mary Wollstonecraft's response to one of her early critics points to the fact that fiction has long been employed by authors to cast a vision for social change. Less acknowledged, however, has been the role of the Christian faith in such works. In this Studies in Theology and the Arts volume, literary scholar Dalene Joy Fisher explores the work of four beloved female novelists: Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Each of these authors, she argues, appealed to the Christian faith through their heroines to challenge cultural expectations regarding women, especially in terms of marriage. Although Christianity has all too often been used to oppress women, Fisher demonstrates that in the hands of these novelists and through the actions of their characters, it could also be a transformative force to liberate women. The Studies in Theology and the Arts? series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.