Overview

Divorce is a conspicuous character trait of modernity, commonly portrayed in texts and on screen, with its moral and social rationalisation firmly rooted in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. The aim of this volume is to bring into focus this contemporary cultural fascination by assembling the variety of academic responses it has started to create. Bringing together the reflections of scholars from the UK and North America who have worked in this domain, this study offers for the first time a genuinely wide-ranging account of the depiction of divorce across the northern hemisphere in a number of media (fiction, journalism, film and television). It reaches historically from the intellectual and legal aftermath of the Enlightenment right up to the present day. As such, the collection shows both the roots of this apparently contemporary phenomenon in nineteenth-century literary practice and the very particular ways in which divorce characterises the different narrative media of modernity.

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9783039101436

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Reviews

Building on an important body of critical work on marriage and adultery, Leydecker and White have with deft insight assembled a group of lively, and in some cases brilliant, essays that through their focus on the heretofore sidelined subject of divorce offer a great deal of texture to the themes of marriage and adultery. (Susan Hiner, Journal of European Studies)

-Building on an important body of critical work on marriage and adultery, Leydecker and White have with deft insight assembled a group of lively, and in some cases brilliant, essays that through their focus on the heretofore sidelined subject of divorce offer a great deal of texture to the themes of marriage and adultery.- (Susan Hiner, Journal of European Studies)

Building on an important body of critical work on marriage and adultery, Leydecker and White have with deft insight assembled a group of lively, and in some cases brilliant, essays that through their focus on the heretofore sidelined subject of divorce offer a great deal of texture to the themes of marriage and adultery. (Susan Hiner, Journal of European Studies)

Author Information

The Editors: Karl Leydecker is Reader in German and Head of the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent. He is the author of Marriage and Divorce in the Plays of Hermann Sudermann. Nicholas White is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he is Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages. He is the author of The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction.

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