Book contents
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Historicising the English Marriage Plot
- Chapter 1 Church, State and the Public Politics of Marriage
- Chapter 2 Clandestine Marriage, Commerce and the Theatre
- Chapter 3 The New Fiction
- Chapter 4 The Patriot Marriage Plot
- Chapter 5 Literary Marriage Plots
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - The Patriot Marriage Plot
Fielding, Shebbeare and Goldsmith
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2019
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Historicising the English Marriage Plot
- Chapter 1 Church, State and the Public Politics of Marriage
- Chapter 2 Clandestine Marriage, Commerce and the Theatre
- Chapter 3 The New Fiction
- Chapter 4 The Patriot Marriage Plot
- Chapter 5 Literary Marriage Plots
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The previous chapter showed that in mid-century England, where marriage loomed large as a political and moral topic, Richardson’s Anglican marriage plot elevated the novel form by figuring marriage as an institution joining the church and the state, and then by imagining characters like Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison who enact and embody that nexus. In the end, Richardson’s novels authorise their own imaginative – that is to say, literary – power by mediating between faith and citizenship (or better, by relaying faith into conjugality) inside the Erastian nation state.
It turns out, however, that the latent nation-buildingtendencies of Richardson’s marriage plots are more fully realised in a different programme: in a series of mid-century oppositional and satiric-sentimental novels that respond to Pamela. Of these, the most important are Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), John Shebbeare’sThe Marriage Act (1754) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766).
- Type
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- Information
- The Origins of the English Marriage PlotLiterature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 134 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019