Reading marriage in the American romance : remembering love as destiny / James Frank Walter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walter, James Frank, 1943-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Marriage in literature.

Love in literature.

Physical Description:

xviii, 279 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, [2008]

Summary:

"James Frank Walter's bold return to a seemingly discredited, cliche-ridden topos-the happy ending that terminates in a marriage as the structuring principle of a perenially popular literary form-is relevatory. By proposing the image of marriage as an aesthetic principle in literature, Walter is also making us aware that the forms of our lives are deeply embedded in and yet shaped by the narratives that are among our guiltiest and most profound pleasures."

Reading Marriage in the American Romance pursues with deep insight a "poetics of marrying" that is implicit in every romance. This distinctive poiesis has been shaped in a genre of literature privileging knowledge rooted in experience, imagination, and future-tending faith, and in traditions of reflection continued in modern and postmodern romance novels such as Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, James's The Beast in the Jungle, Morrison's Beloved, Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome, and Frazier's Cold Mountain. Eight chapters offering fine-grained studies of these entertaining and illuminating romances exemplify interpretive approaches that will help readers recognize intimate connections between romance-as expression of Eros, cultural practice, and literary form-and the emblem of its narrative goal, marriage. Indeed, what James Frank Walter helps us see is how to see-in plot, setting, character, archetype, intertextuality, poetic shaping of word and image, historical-cultural context, and fateful unfoldings-not only the sources of marriage in desire, memory, and human freedom, but also its deep challenges, rewards, and consequences for individuals and society. Readers of this book should gain a better understanding, with help from philosophical and theological speculation, of not only what marriage is but why marriage matters, particularly in the present climate in which, along with so much naivete about love's magical power to make things right, there is a vocal despair whether committed love can be helped at all, particularly if it is trammeled by the vow "until death."

Contents:

Reading romance, remembering love lost

Specular shapes of time in the house of Hawthorne's romance

Alice's posies in Hawthorne's romance Poiēsis

An untimely deferral of marriage in Henry James's The beast in the jungle

Regathering romance from the traumata of rememory in Morrison's Beloved

A human love to heal : artificial intelligence in Percy's The thanatos syndrome

Marriage and a sense of the past in Frazier's Cold mountain

Marriage, a new life remembering.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-262) and index.

ISBN:

9780739121788

0739121782

OCLC:

155127713