Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Bigamy Plot
  • Cited by 28
      • Show more authors
      • You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Select format
    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      05 May 2015
      18 May 2015
      ISBN:
      9781316215982
      9781107103160
      9781107501348
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316215982
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.52kg, 260 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.4kg, 260 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
      Series:
      Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (100)
    You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Selected: Digital
    Add to cart View cart Buy from Cambridge.org
    Subjects:
    Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
    Series:
    Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (100)
    Information

    Book description

    The courtship plot dominates accounts of the Victorian novel, but this innovative study turns instead to a narrative phenomenon that upends its familiar conventions: the bigamy plot. In hundreds of novels, plays, and poems published in Victorian Great Britain, husbands or wives thought dead suddenly reappear to their newly remarried spouses. In the sensation fiction of Braddon and Collins, these bigamous revelations lead to bribery, arson, and murder, but the same plot operates in the canonical fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. These authors employ bigamy plots to destabilize the apparently conventional form and values of the Victorian novel. By close examination of this plot, including an index of nearly 300 bigamy novels, Maia McAleavey makes the case for a historical approach to narrative, one that is grounded in the legal and social changes of the period but that runs counter to our own formal and cultural expectations.

    Reviews

    'The Bigamy Plot is an important contribution to Victorian studies and narrative theory.'

    Tara MacDonald Source: Review of English Studies

    Refine List

    Actions for selected content:

    Select all | Deselect all
    • View selected items
    • Export citations
    • Download PDF (zip)
    • Save to Kindle
    • Save to Dropbox
    • Save to Google Drive

    Save Search

    You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

    Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
    Cancel
    ×

    Contents

    Contents

    Metrics

    Altmetric attention score

    Full text views

    Total number of HTML views: 0
    Total number of PDF views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    Book summary page views

    Total views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    * Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

    Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

    Accessibility standard: Unknown

    Why this information is here

    This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

    Accessibility Information

    Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.