Families of the Heart: Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850) - Hardcover

Campbell, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1684484243 ISBN 13: 9781684484249

Publisher: Bucknell University Press, 2022

Synopsis

In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device―the surrogate family―as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope―the model of the hierarchal family―ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

About this title

About the Author

ANN CAMPBELL has published articles about family, courtship and marriage, and pedagogy in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Women, Aphra Behn Online, and Digital Defoe. She is a professor of English at Boise State University in Idaho.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• ISBN 10: 1684484243
• ISBN 13: 9781684484249
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176