Broken engagements: the action for breach of promise of marriage and the feminine ideal, 1800-1940

This book explores ideals of femininity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by charting responses to broken engagements. Interweaving a history of the legal remedies available for a broken promise of marriage with literary accounts from Dickens to Wodehouse, the book offers a major insight intomodern attitudes to female identity. INDICE: Introduction; I: Situating the Project: Law, Cultural Ideology,and Nineteenth-Century Women's History; II: Tools of Analysis: Empiricism andLiterature; 1: Codifying Womanhood: The Nineteenth-Century Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage as the Legal Expression of the Ideal of True Womanhood;2: A Structural Inconsistency: The True Woman and the Breach-of-Promise Plaintiff; 3: Breach of Promise in the Early Nineteenth Century (1800-50): Strategies of Containment, a Created Inconsistency, and the Aesthetic of the Grotesque; 4: Breach of Promise in the High Victorian Period (1850-1900): The Inconsistency Unveiled, Pinchbeck Angels, and the Dominance of Satire; 5: Breach of Promise in the Post-Victorian Period (1900-40): A Changing Ideal, the Action>'s Decline, and the Symbolism of Breach of Promise; Epilogue: The Power of the Image

• ISBN: 978-0-19-956997-7
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 240
• Fecha Publicación: 11/02/2010
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés