Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf
Language: English
Published by Cornell University Press, 2008
- Hardcover
- Used

Seller: Bay State Book Company, North Smithfield, RI, U.S.A.Bay State Book Company
AbeBooks seller since January 23, 2023
Condition: Used - Very good
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- Title
- Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf
- Author
- Corbett, Mary Jean
- Publisher
- Cornell University Press
- Publication year
- 2008
- Condition
- very_good
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0801447070
- ISBN 13
- 9780801447075
In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed.
In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families―between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees―offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.
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About the Author
Mary Jean Corbett is John W. Steube Professor of English and Affiliate of Women's Studies, Miami University. She is the author of Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870 and Representing Femininity.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Bay State Book Company
North Smithfield, RI, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since January 23, 2023
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