Karl
Leydecker and Jenny DiPlacidi
After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century:
Literature, Law and Society
London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 214 pp.
ISBN:
9783319600970
This book examines the intersections
between the ways that marriage was represented in eighteenth-century writing
and art, experienced in society, and regulated by law. The interdisciplinary
and comparative essays explore the marital experience beyond the ‘matrimonial
barrier’ to encompass representations of married life including issues of
spousal abuse, parenting, incest, infidelity and the period after the end of
marriage, to include annulment, widowhood and divorce. The chapters range from
these focuses on legal and social histories of marriage to treatments of
marriage in eighteenth-century periodicals, to depictions of married couples
and families in eighteenth-century art, to parallels in French literature and
diaries, to representations of violence and marriage in Gothic novels, and to
surveys of same-sex partnerships. The volume is aimed towards students and
scholars working in the long eighteenth century, gender studies, women’s
writing, publishing history, and art and legal historians.
Karl Leydeckerhas been Vice-Principal Learning
and Teaching and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the
University of Dundee in Scotland since 2013. Before that he was Dean of
Humanities at the University of Kent, UK. His research interests include
marriage and divorce in western literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth
centuries.
Jenny DiPlacidiis Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century
Studies and Romanticism at the University of Kent, UK. Her research interests
include representations of incest, sexuality and gender in British and American
literature of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a focus on the
Gothic and magazine fiction.
