Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books

Book SynopsisThis book is the definitive critical history of science fiction. The 2006 first edition of this work traced the development of the genre from Ancient Greece and the European Reformation through to the end of the 20th century. This new 2nd edition has been revised thoroughly and very significantly expanded. An all-new final chapter discusses 21st-century science fiction, and there is new material in every chapter: a wealth of new readings and original research. The author''s groundbreaking thesis that science fiction is born out of the 17th-century Reformation is here bolstered with a wide range of new supporting material and many hundreds of 17th- and 18th-century science fiction texts, some of which have never been discussed before. The account of 19th-century science fiction has been expanded, and the various chapters tracing the twentieth-century bring in more writing by women, and science fiction in other media including cinema, TV, comics, fan-culture and other modes.Table of ContentsPreface to Second Edition.- Preface to First Edition (2006).- 1. Definitions.- 2. SF and the Ancient Novel.- 3. From Medieval Romance to Sixteenth-Century Utopia.- 4. 17th-Century SF.- 5. 18th-Century SF. Big, Little.- 6. Early 19th Century SF.- 7. SF 1850-1900: Mobility and Mobilisation.- 8. Verne and Wells.- 9. The Early Twentieth Century, 1: High Modernist SF.- 10. The Early Twentieth Century, 2: The Pulps.- 11. Golden Age SF: 1940-1960.- 12. The Impact of the New Wave: SF of the 1960s and 1970s.- 13. SF Screen Media, 1960-2000: Hollywood Cinema and TV.- 14. Prose SF of the 1980s and 1990s.- 15. Late 20th Century SF: Multimedia, Visual SF and Others.- 16. 21st Century Science Fiction.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-

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Book SynopsisThis book seeks to explain how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be the glamorous and artistic Romantic malady. It tries to explain the disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, by examining literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, covering a wide range of authors and characters.Trade ReviewShortlisted for the 2008 ESSE Book Award in the field of Literatures in the English Language. 'The scholarship displayed in this book - both literary and medical - is immense. Over the past decade there has been increasing interest in the relationship between literature and disease [and] Lawlor's book is a superb contribution to this field of study, as it extends the literary study of consumption back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while significantly broadening this discussion beyond the major consumptive writers... to produce a veritable canon of consumptive writing. Lawlor's book is the best history of this literary disease that we have' - Professor Alan Bewell, Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada 'This book provides much more than the title promises. It explores interpretations of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) from the Renaissance to the Victorian period...The result is a finely balanced exploration of historical and literary conceptions of consumption from the viewpoints of patients, physicians, and onlookers...Summing Up: Recommended.' - A. E. McKim, Choice 'Clark Lawlor's scholarly account of 'consumption narratives' is to be recommended as a well-informed and engaging contribution to the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary studies addressing the literary representation of disease...Lawlor's fascinating study provides new readings of canonical literary texts, as well as alerting us to lesser-known sources including medical texts, journals and private correspondence to provide a valuable account of the evolving aesthetics of consumption.' - David E. Shuttleton, Journal of Literature and Science 'By uncovering the link between sensitivity and genius, Lawlor aims to explain that association.' Judith Hawley, Eighteenth-Century studies, Vol.42, No. 1, 2008 'This is a book, like the consumptives it describes, in which a slender frame belies vital force and purpose.' - James Whitehead, BARS Bulletin & ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction PART I: RENAISSANCE Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition The 'Golden Disease': Early Modern Religious Consumptions PART II: ENLIGHTENMENT 'The genteel, linear, consumptive make': the Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental 'A consuming malady and a consuming mistress': Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility PART III: ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN Wasting Poets 'Seeming delicately slim': Consumed and Consuming Women Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy Conclusion: Germ Theory and After Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisBlake's Night Thoughts discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth-century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth.Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: 'The Sun is Gone Down' 'In the Silent of the Night' Young, and 'Weary Night' Night Dreams: The Four Zoas 'I see London, Blind...' 'Forests of the Night': Blake and Madness Dante's 'Deep and Woody Way' Notes Index

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Book SynopsisDr Deborah Cartmell is Reader in English and Head of the Graduate Centre in the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University. She is currently co-editing the international journal Adaptation and has completed several books on Literature on Screen. She is a general editor of the Screen Adaptations series, and a founding member of the Association of Literature on Screen.Trade Review[The Screen Adaptations series] offers some meaty ideas to film studies students. -- Susan Elkin * The Stage *

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Book SynopsisMichie's fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice between two women at its heart, shows it to be as much about politics and economics as it is about personal choice.Trade ReviewA seminal body of outstanding scholarship and a very highly recommended addition to academic library English Literature reference collections and supplemental reading lists. Midwest Book Review An indispensable survey of the figure of the rich woman in the novel of manners from Austen to James... Michie's writing is clear, precise, and lucid. An important work. Essential. Choice Bold, engaging, and richly complicated... It is immensely valuable in calling our attention to the relationship between nineteenth-century marriage plots and the discourses of political economy generally and to the maligned but ubiquitous figure of the heiress in particular, challenging critics today to overcome their own sense of money as a vulgar question. -- Nancy Henry Review of English Studies Michie's book opens up new angles from which to think about the relations between money and marrying in nineteenth-century fiction. -- Rachel Bowlby Times Literary Supplement One of the most valuable pieces of criticism this year. The emphasis and clarity of its writing is a delight in itself. -- Talia Schaffer Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies The mixture of laughter, guilt, and envy that characterizes our culture's response to the unattractive rich woman is fully explored and exorcized in this closely argued study. -- Valerie Sanders Nineteenth-Century Literature This is a valuable study that will be useful to anyone interested in gender and economics in the nineteenth century. -- Patricia Zakreski Modern Language Review The rich development of its themes, no less than its local insights, should place this book high on Victorianists' reading lists. -- Jill Rappoport Victorian Studies This is a sophisticated and thought-provoking study. The Year's Work in English StudiesTable of ContentsPreface: Vulgarity, Wealth, and GenderAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Rich Woman / Poor Woman: An Anthropology of the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot1. Social Distinction in Jane Austen2. Frances Trollope and the Problem of Appetite3. Anthony Trollope's "Subtle Materialism"4. Margaret Oliphant and the Professional Ideal5. Henry James and the End(s) of the Marriage PlotAfterword From Pemberley to ManderleyNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe poetry of Christina Rossetti is often described as gothic'' and yet this term has rarely been examined in the specific case of Rossetti''s work. Based on new readings of the full range of her writings, from Goblin Market'' to the devotional poems and prose works, this book explores Rossetti''s use of Gothic forms and images to consider her as a Gothic writer. Christina Rossetti''s Gothic analyses the poet''s use of the grotesque and the spectral and the Christian roots and Pre-Raphaelite influences of Rossetti''s deployment of Gothic tropes.Trade Review[Trowbridge] resists the tendency to read Rossetti through a biographical lens, or to reclaim her to a feminist poetics that requires the omission of her devotional works. Instead, gothic becomes a framework for understanding Rossetti's poetry, in the context of her literary influences and Tractarian faith ... [an] insightful monograph. -- Susan Civale * Times Literary Supplement *This monograph succeeds in offering a genuinely fresh perspective on Christina Rossetti's work, making a persuasive case for viewing her as a Gothic writer . . . through a mix of careful close reading and wide-ranging contextual and theoretical research. -- Gregory Tate, University of Surrey * The Pre-Raphaelite Society *Trowbridge’s book adds a tremendous amount simply in opening up the Gothic as an area of study for Rossetti. The connections she draws are persuasively established, clearly elaborated, and reframe not only Rossetti’s works but their religious heritage. Built on excellent research into Rossetti’s reading habits and inclinations from youth to maturity, as well as the aesthetic theories and critical attitudes that are likely to have influenced her writing, this study offers serious and fruitful engagements with a number of important works and figures from Rossetti’s time to the present. -- Heather McAlpine, University of the Fraser Valley * Journal of Victorian Culture *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Spectrality of Rossettian Gothic 2. Early Influences: Rossetti and the Gothic of Maturin 3. ‘Goblin Market' and Gothic 4. Rossetti, Ruskin and the Moral Grotesque 5. Shadows of Heaven: Rossetti's Prose Works Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHedda is an intelligent and ambitious woman, trapped in the stifling environment of a bourgeois 19th-century marriage. When writer Eilert Loevborg, an old flame returns to Hedda's life with a masterpiece that might threaten her husband's career, Hedda decides to take drastic and fatal action.

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Book SynopsisMarit Grøtta is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway.Trade ReviewGrøtta is as comfortable dissecting four lines of a Baudelaire prose poem as she is discerning broad shifts in critical approaches to media. … The book offers unfailingly interesting micro-histories of the various dispositives under scrutiny, and the debate that emerges is always inclusive and informed. … [T]he contention that Baudelaire’s writings often paraphrased the conventions of new media is defended with an agility and intellectual vigor that prove, in the end, difficult to resist. * Times Literary Supplement *Although Baudelaire in 1859 famously denounced photography as sterile technology aiming to reproduce reality at the expense of artistic beauty, his writing was in fact framed, fashioned, and mediated through the new visual media of the period. In this rich multidisciplinary study, Grøtta argues that Baudelaire’s poetic sensibility can be fully understood only in the context of the media-saturated environment in which it took shape … Drawing on careful analysis of Baudelaire’s prose poems and theories of writers as different as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Agamben, Grøtta skillfully brings to light Baudelaire’s complex relationship with the rapidly developing text and image-based media of the 19th century … Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. -- C. B. Kerr, Vassar College * CHOICE *Grøtta offers a thorough examination of the poet’s art as the aesthetics of Paris’s flâneur par excellence. ... A time museum of sorts, this book can be conceived as a stroll through galleries devoted to the new media available in Baudelaire’s society. The role of newspapers, photographs, precinematic devices, toys, and corporeality in Baudelaire’s works is substantiated by remarkable analyses of his Petits Poèmes en Prose. Grøtta skilfully masters the delicate art of lively description. .... All in all, Marit Grøtta’s monograph is a delightful and perfectly documented work that certainly deserves to be read by comparative literature scholars. As an original effort to bridge the gap between too often separated though arguably related disciplines, this book definitely offers new avenues through which to explore the link between literary analysis and visual (or other) mediation. ... [Readers] will surely appreciate the opportunity of going back in time offered by Grotta’s remarkable scholarly work. * Recherche littéraire/Literary Research *[Grøtta] has provided the context—prior and contemporary—to Baudelaire’s writings in a large number of areas: fascinating glimpses of public amusements, optical toys, slang expressions, as well as explanations, market considerations, and interpretations. This wealth of information makes her arguments—clearly restated at chapter’s end—easy to accept. ... What Grøtta does is essential to a deeper understanding of Baudelaire: despite Baudelaire’s aversion to photography, she detects in it a cult of the image and a concept of identity that would only become widespread with the advent of the twentieth century and its use of identity cards. ... Grøtta traces Baudelaire’s debts, and these debts are not to the usual authors and creditors, but to fields, devices, and practices that the poet explicitly disdained: the press, and its use of commonplaces; photography, and its appeal to the masses and their uncritical acceptance of its ‘truth’; toys, and their vulgarity. * Nineteenth-Century French Studies *This assured study looks at the wide aesthetic implications of Baudelaire’s engagement with new and emerging media technologies. With chapters on newspapers, photographs, and pre-cinematic devices such as the kaleidoscope, Marit Grøtta’s book challenges narrow Benjaminian-inflected readings of Baudelaire by offering fresh analyses of familiar prose poems that showcase Baudelaire’s awareness of new ways of experiencing the world … This book is suitable for readers both familiar with and new to Baudelaire. Grøtta’s strength lies in the limpidity of her writing, which clearly condenses Baudelaire’s aesthetic thought in relation to different media forms. * French Studies *Grøtta clearly knows Baudelaire’s personal and literary writings very well and skilfully reads the interactions between media and literature ... Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics will be of particular value for anyone who is interested in Baudelaire as a writer and also, perhaps not that surprisingly, for those interested in Walter Benjamin. * The British Society for Literature and Science *Grøtta’s Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics is a highly topical, trans-disciplinary exploration of Baudelaire’s writings in the wider context of the evolution of text- and image-based media, from newspapers to photography and pre-cinematic technologies, in nineteenth-century France. Innovatively bringing together literary and visual culture studies, and drawing on theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, Grøtta’s discussion sheds new light not only on Baudelaire’s writings, but also on the figure of the flâneur, mediated viewing and mobile perception, among other topics in media and cultural studies. * Kathrin Yacavone, Assistant Professor of French, University of Nottingham, UK *By reading Baudelaire’s relation to various 19th century media, including newspapers, painting, photography, and optical toys such as kaleidoscopes, Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics offers a compelling alternative to Walter Benjamin’s influential account of his poetry and aesthetics and advances our understanding of the emergence of a new media world out of its 19th century beginnings. * Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, USA *Marit Grøtta’s book brings a renewed view to the prose poetry of Baudelaire by exploring his immersion in the new print and visual media environment of his time. Balancing a literary approach to prose poetry with a conceptualization of media as living environment and technical forms of mediation, Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics sheds new light on the modern “optical unconscious”and develops an original interpretive frame to read Walter Benjamin via Baudelaire, rather than the other way around. With astute links between the works of Marx, Freud, and Benjamin, Grøtta offers a fresh portrait of the flâneur, which she also enriches with her analyses of the divergent views on modern media by Giorgio Agamben and Bruno Latour. * Catherine Nesci, Chair of Comparative Literature, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA, and author of Le Flâneur et les flâneuses (2007) *Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics invites us to look back at Charles Baudelaire’s writings through the specificity and historicity of new technologies of vision rather than with the naked eye alone. … The book analyses a thought-provoking combination of media…to study similarities between Baudelaire’s encounters with different media and assess how media played a role in shaping his idea of modernity. … The entire book is clearly argued and logically presented. … Grøtta’s book therefore makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Baudelaire, “a lyric poet in the age of new media” (6) as read by Benjamin, but also of Benjamin’s writings on visual technologies as they relate to Baudelaire by way of Agamben’s readings of both Baudelaire and Benjamin. The book’s appeal is indeed that it can make such complex connections among poems and media in an engaging, coherent, and lucid analysis. * French Forum *Table of Contents1. Introduction 2. Newspapers 3. Photographs 4. Pre-cinematic Devices 5. Corporeality 6. Toys 7. Media Imagery and Modernity Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFollowing his second marriage in 1907 Arthur Conan Doyle was looking to the future. The years ahead would see the birth of three children, fresh literary success and the discovery of his new faith. Those same years would also see the First World War, the final adventures of Sherlock Holmes and ridicule from the religious and scientific communities for his beliefs.

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Book SynopsisHere is a highly informative yet accessibly-written introduction to the life and works of the writer and political thinker Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), who as President of the Muslim League played a vital role in the birth of Pakistan, and is revered today as its spiritual founder. In discussing Iqbal's thought, and analysing his poetry and prose at some length, Mir suggests that Iqbal represents a paragon for modern Muslims, caught as they are between tradition and modernity. Iqbal's attempt to integrate Islamic and Western elements in his intellectual, artistic and political lives makes him a figure that Muslims may respect and emulate, since he declared his passionate loyalty to the religion of Islam while at the same time differentiating between the eternal, or essential, and the historical, or incidental, in the Islamic tradition.

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Book SynopsisChekhov's Dama s sobachkoy (1899) is perhaps the most celebrated example of his shorter prose and one of the most famous stories in Russian literature. The tale of an adulterous liaison, set in Yalta, it shows to greatest effect Chekhov's propensity for the conjuring of mood and atmosphere. The tale's modernity is displayed too in its anticlimactic conclusion of poignant open-endedness: ' ...and it was clear to both that the end was still far, far off and that the most complicated and difficult part was only beginning.'

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Book SynopsisFrom the author of MASTER AND MARGARITA, BLACK SNOW and DIABOLIAD, a novel which features a Moscow professor who befriends a stray dog and transplants into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man, unleashing a human dog which turns the professor's life into a nightmare beyond endurance.

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Book SynopsisThe novel "Woe From Wit" by the writer and satirist, Griboyedov, is part of the Bristol Classical Press Russian texts series. The series is designed to meet the needs of the fast-growing A Level and undergraduate market for texts in the Russian language. Each text comes with English notes and vocabulary, and with an introduction by an editor with an expert knowledge both of the work and of its literary and cultural context.

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Book SynopsisA.D.P. Briggs is Professor Emeritus, University of Birmingham, and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol, UK. He was awarded the Pushkin Medal 'for distinguished writing about Pushkin in the English Language', and a second Pushkin Medal was awarded 'for an outstanding contribution to the Pushkin bicentennial celebration'. His many books include Alexander Pushkin: a Critical Study, (1991); Eugene Onegin, Landmarks of World Literature (1992), and as editor Alexander Pushkin (1997) and translator Eugene Onegin (1995).

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Book SynopsisGogol's "The Government Inspector" must be one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted plays in the history of drama. This work shows the wisdom, humour and subtlety that is missing in many English translations. The work is part of a series aimed at school and university students.

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1835, this is one of two works by Gogol dealing with the "little man" (the other is "The Overcoat"). Of over 150 examples of this genre, these two stories are often considered the most complex, both linguistically and psychologically. Poprischin is not at the bottom of the social ladder; he is a middle-aged, grade nine civil servant, with at least ten minions under him. Nevertheless he is painfully aware of the social gap between himself and his Director and, even more so, between himself and Sophie, the Director's daughter. Poprischin's frustrated love for Sophie drives him into madness, the stages of which are catalogued in diary form. These stages include imagined conversations between dogs and hallucinations set in a Spanish madhouse. This edition is based on the latest critical edition of the text to be published in Russia and follows the 1835 version of the text.

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Book SynopsisOne of Pushkin's most famous works, "Eugene Onegin" has been called an "enclyclopaedia of Russian life", a definition which suggests the mass of ideas, impressions, thoughts and possibilities to be found in the story of the doomed love of two members of Russian high society in the 1830s. This study aims to offer an up-to-date guide to the text and to the critical debate, as well as providing easy-to-follow "readings". It takes a fresh look at its themes, ideas and intricacies, and suggests how scholars and non-specialists alike may gain greater understanding of Pushkin's work.

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Book SynopsisIn the 19th century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. While fetishism, sadism and masochism still resonate as concepts with critical currency, necrophilia has received little attention. In this groundbreaking study, Lisa Downing rescues necrophilia from the margins of sexual desire, relocating it as a symptom and a pervasive fantasy of modern subjectivity. Drawing case material from the 19th century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with foundational European texts of sexology and Psychoanalysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, the conventions of 19th century literary scholarship, and feminist critiques of the 'masculine' morbid aesthetic in order to bring to light a model of desire whose problematic nature afflicts existing discourses about sexuality and gender in 19th century France and beyond.

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Book SynopsisThis collection gathers together an exciting new series of critical essays on the Romantic- and Victorian-period poet John Clare, which each take a rigorous approach to both persistent and emergent themes in his life and work. Designed to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Clare’s first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, the scholarship collected here both affirms Clare’s importance as a major nineteenth-century poet and reveals how his verse continually provokes fresh areas of enquiry. Offering new archival, theoretical, and sometimes corrective insights into Clare’s world and work, the essays in this volume cover a multitude of topics, including Clare’s immersion in song and print culture, his formal ingenuity, his environmental and ecological imagination, his mental and physical health, and his experience of asylums. This book gives students a range of imaginative avenues into Clare’s work, and offers both new readers and experienced Clare scholars a vital set of contributions to ongoing critical debates.Table of Contents1. Introduction; Simon Kövesi and Erin Lafford.- 2. Poetry’s Variety: John Clare and the Poetic Scene in the 1820s and 1830; David Stewart.- 3. ‘Sweet the Merry Bells Ring Round’: John Clare’s songs for the drawing room; Kirsteen McCue.- 4.‘Sea Songs Love Ballads &c &c’: John Clare and Vernacular Song; Stephanie Kuduk Weiner.- 5. John Clare’s Landforms; Sara Lodge.- 6. John Clare’s Ear: Metres and Rhythms; Andrew Hodgson.- 7. The Shepherd’s Calendar and Forms of Repetition; Sarah Houghton-Walker.- 8. John Clare’s Dynamic Animals; James Castell.- 9. Multispecies Work in John Clare’s ‘Bird Nesting’ Poems; Katey Castellano.- 10. Biosemiosis and Posthumanism in John Clare’s Multi-Centered Environments; Scott Hess.- 11. Common Distress: John Clare’s Poetic Strain; Michael Nicholson.- 12. ‘fancys or feelings’: John Clare’s Hypochondriac Poetics; Erin Lafford.- 13. ‘A song in the night’: reconsidering John Clare’s later asylum poetry; James Whitehead.- Index.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.Table of ContentsIntroduction: the Romantic cultures of infancy 1. ‘A detached peninsula’: infancy in the work of Thomas De Quincey. Martina Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy 2. William Blake’s Infant Joy. Robert Rix 3. The infant, the mother, and the breast in the paintings of Marguerite Gérard. Loren Lerner 4. Mother at the source: romanticism and infant education. Robert A. Davis 5. Coleridge, the ridiculous child, and the limits of Romanticism. Andrew McInnes 6. Educational experiments: childhood sympathy, regulation and object relations in Maria Edgeworth’s writing about education. Charles Armstrong 7. ‘Advice [...] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: human and non-human infancy in eighteenth-century moral animal tales. Anja Höing 8. William Godwin, Romantic-era historiography and the political cultures of infancy. John-Erik Hansson 9. Experimenting with children: infants in the scientific imagination. Lisa Ann Robertson 10. ‘A wretch so sad, so lorn’: the feral child and the Romantic cultures of infancy. Rolf Lessenich

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Book SynopsisMarriage 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.

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