There is a prehistory of the adultery novel, which became a pan-European literary paradigm in the second half of the 19th century. In the wake of the French Revolution, secular marriage legislation emerges, producing a metaphorical surplus that is still effective today. Using legal history and canonical literary texts from Rousseau to Goethe and Manzoni to Hugo and Flaubert, this book traces how marriage around 1800 became a figure of reflection for the modern nation-state. In the process, original contributions to the philology of the individual texts emerge. At the same time, law and literature are made fruitful for a historical semantics of society and community.This book is a translation of an original German 1st edition “Ehe als Nationalfiktion” by Dagmar Stöferle, published by J.B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). The author (with the support of Chris Owain Carter) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.
Author(s): Dagmar Stöferle
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 354
City: Berlin
Contents
Abbreviations
1: Introduction
1.1 Novel and Marriage
1.2 Marriage and Nation
1.3 Couple and Community
1.4 Text Corpus and Structure of the Work
2: Marriage Around 1800: Between Contract and Sacrament
2.1 Secularization of Marriage? Sacramentality and Jurisdiction
Marriage as Metaphor and Dispositive
Visibility, or Pauline Mystery
Process of Making Visible: The Couple Consensus Between Sacrament and Contract
From the Sacred State to the Moral State Purpose
2.2 Band of Division: The Revolutionary Marriage Legislation
Divorce
Marriage
Marriage Practice: Festival, Law, Origin
2.3 Two or Many: Rousseau Between Social and Marriage Contract
Julie as the General Will Personified
Modern Art of Government: Julie and Wolmar
Julie’s Death and the Question of Justice
The Politics and Religion of Civil Marriage
3: Manzoni: Law and Novel
3.1 Couple Poetics
3.2 Renzo in the Process of Profanation
Storia della Colonna Infame: Intertextual Self-Assertion
The Narrator as the Judges’ Judge
Metapoetics: Logic and Rhetoric of Improbability
Legal Poetology: Earthly Criminal Law and Marriage Law
Renzo’s Irony
Ambivalent Politics of Affect
Between Mass and Power: Renzo’s Disappointed Revolution
Conversion, Impure and Natural
Nascitur Renzo: The Dream of the Profane Narrative
3.3 Lucia in the Process of Sacralization
Marianna de Leyva as Geltrude/Gertrude
Included and Excluded Passion
Gertrude, la Signora
Between Action and Language: On the Question of Guilt
Latent Love: Gertrude – Lucia
Lucia’s voto: Conversion as an Error
The Solution of the Vow, Critical of Law
Communauté Inavouable
4: Between Märchen and Novel: Goethe’s Marriage Experiments
4.1 From the Marriage Novellas of the Ausgewanderten to the Utopia of Domination
Revolutionary Passions and Troubled Marriages
Spouses and Legal Entities
4.2 Excursus: Romantic Mating, Transcending Marriage (Novalis)
4.3 Herrmann und Dorothea: Epic Disguise
Marriage Idyll and Patriarchy (Voß’ Luise)
From Dressing Gown …
… to Revolution
Marriage of Love and Revolution
Apotropaic Pairing
Engagement as a Touching of Opposites
‘Purely Human’: Between Aesthetic and National Norm
4.4 Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Representation of the Production of a (Decision Not to) Divorce
From the Attempt to the Fall
Escalations
Divorce Prevention
The Ottilie Case: Double Law and Asymmetrical Appearance
5: Novels on Trial: Notre-Dame de Paris and Madame Bovary
5.1 Dynastic Nuptials
5.2 Marriages of Convenience
5.3 Quasimodo’s Wedding
5.4 Production and Presentation
6: Close
6.1 Novel and Marriage
6.2 Marriage and Nation
6.3 Couple and Community
References
Text Editions of the Authors (Rousseau, Manzoni, Goethe, Hugo, Flaubert)
Other Sources
Secondary Literature
Index
