Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- 1. Idealized Romantic Love, Legal Issues, and Patriarchic Exploitation: An Introduction to Historical and Literary Marriage Discourses -- Section I: Marriage Discourses in Law and Politics -- 2. Political Marriage in Antiquity -- 3. Marriage Discourses in Conflict: Public and Private Order in Early Modern Spain -- 4. Challenging Patriarchy: Marriage and the Reform of Marriage Law in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic -- Section II: Marriage Discourses and Social Criticism -- 5. On the Discourse of the "New Sexual Morality" in the German Empire: Robert Michels' Sexual Ethics between Women's Movement, Social Democracy, and Sociology -- 6. Marriage as Exploitation: Emma Goldman and the Anarchist Concept of Female Liberation -- 7 To End the Yoke of Marriage: Mary Hunter Austin and the Struggle Against Patriarchal Norms -- Section III: Marriage Discourses in Literature -- 8. Redefining Marriage in Interwar Britain: Internal Transformation and Personal Sacrifice in the Poetry of H.D. -- 9. Scenes from a Marriage: The Age of Innocence as Discourse on the Transactional Value of Marriage -- 10. "Marriages are just performances": Staging Fashion, Comedy, and Feminism in Love, Loss and What I Wore -- Contributors -- Index

Marriage was historically not only a romantic ideal, but a tool of exploitation of women in many regards. Women were often considered commodities and marriage was far away from the romantic stereotypes people relate to it today. While marriages served as diplomatic tools or means of political legitimization in the past, the discourses about marital relationships changed and women expressed their demands more openly. Discourses about marriage in history and literature naturally became more and more heated, especially during the "long" 19th century, when marriages were contested by social reformers or political radicals, male and female alike. The present volume provides a discussion of the role of marriage and the discourses about in different chronological and geographical contexts and shows which arguments played an important role for the demand for more equality in martial relationships. It focuses on marriage discourses, may they have been legal or rather socio-political ones. In addition, the disputes about marriage in literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented to complement the historical debates

Funded by Nord University

In English.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Nov 2021).

WorldCat record variable field(s) change: 050, 082, 650