Kathy Alexis Psomiades

Primitive Marriage (eBook, ePUB)

Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Marriage is the novel's traditional subject matter. But what happens to the novel when another genre of writing lays claim to the novel's traditional material? Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity shows how the foundational ideas of the new discipline of anthropology gave late-Victorian novelists and social scientists ways of rethinking heterosexual romance by referring to a new kind of history, one in which marriage systems, sexual behavior, and reproductive practices were temporalized and given historical agency. Temporalizing sexual relations, locating them in evolutionary and historical time, anthropologists and the novelists who wrote after them began to think modernity in sexual terms. This transformation of politics into sexual politics put sexuality and gender at the center of liberal stories of progress. The Victorian theorists responsible for this transformation-from well-known figures like Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud to lesser-known writers like John McLennan and Henry Maine-and the novelists who engaged them-Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Henry James, Sarah Grand, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy-not only helped produce sexually modern subjects, but also the theories about sexuality, time, and politics that we still draw upon to think modernity today.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. März 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780192678652
• Artikelnr.: 67602518

Autorenporträt

Kathy Alexis Psomiades is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She received her PhD from Yale University and previously taught at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (1997) and co-editor with Talia Schaffer of Women and British Aestheticism (1999).

Inhaltsangabe

* Acknowledgements
* Introduction: Sexualizing modernity
* 1: Sexualizing economic modernity: Property and exchange in The
Eustace Diamonds
* 2: Sexualizing political modernity: Herbert Spencer, George Eliot,
and the sexual contract
* 3: Aestheticizing sexual modernity: Darwinian aesthetics and eugenics
* 4: Sexualizing intellectual modernity: Mythic marriage in She and
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
* Conclusion: After Primitive Marriage
* References
* Index