Between the no-fault divorce revolution and various court rulings classifying sexual behavior between two adults as a private, intimate matter, some scholars have noted a shift away from traditional morality around sex in conjugal, cohabiting, and dating relationships in family law. The act of sex in a romantic relationship is often perceived as one’s complete liberty without bounds. Many underrate the legal consequences attached to their sexual behavior. However, sex is still the defining consideration that creates legal recognition of a romantic relationship between two people. It creates legal duties to each other and any minor involved in the partnership, irrespective of biological ties, in a relational parentage era. Past and recent court rulings, including rulings from nonmarital, intimate partner violence, and parentage cases, are provided as examples to recount the legal meaning of the act of sex.

Many mediated channels are available for relational partners to use for relational partners. At times these channels are facilitating long-standing relational processes such as relational maintenance, whereas at other times the channels provide new mechanisms for relational tasks such as gathering information about potential and new romantic partners or presenting the relationship to the couple’s broader social network. This chapter reviews relational processes through the lens of social media. The chapter overviews how romantic couples use social media in the initial stages of relationships to find potential romantic partners and seek information about potential and new partners, to communicate maintenance behaviors throughout the relationship, and the impact of social media during the dissolution phases. Both positively valenced behaviors (e.g., comanaging relational impressions and using social media to create electronic tie-signs) and negatively valenced behaviors (e.g., ghosting and cyberstalking) are discussed.

This chapter offers a very brief introduction to the topic addressed in this book and presents a general outline.

Cultural groups address the initiation, development, and maintenance of romantic relationships and marriage in diverse ways. Western values, beliefs, and populations have dominated theory and research, which has led to a relatively monocultural science of relationships. This chapter explores the developing literature on East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to suggest avenues for further investigation of culturally-defined relationships. We first focus on relatively broad social, ideological, and institutional factors that shape the East Asian Confucian cultural model of marriage in comparison to Western models of relationships. Then we review research linking distinctive East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving to culturally valued practices, attitudes, and behaviors in romantic relationships and marriage.

The second chapter explores how literary writing in the Romantic period denies and decries caricature. I describe a ’caricature talk’, dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric, that seeks to establish the quality, verisimilitude and representational justice of textual characterisations; and I explore how caricature talk constitutes formal realism in the literary criticism of the Romantic period. The second part of the chapter positions imaginative literary caricature in relation to anxiety about prospographic and personal caricature describing real people, providing essential context for Chapter 3’s discussion of character originality and realism.

The sixth and final chapter considers horror writing’s appropriation of flesh-caricature from writing descriptive of the human body, dismantling character’s place in formal realism. I explore the grotesquing of the disproportioned body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her short story ’Transformation’, and in Walter Scott’s dwarf characters, where the aesthetic type of the ’gigantic dwarf’ gives rise to a mode of writing I call ’horrid realism’. The second part of the chapter grounds horrid realism in eighteenth-century texts that imagine the literalisation of caricatúra, such as Thomas Browne’s depiction of the Hippocratic face, and the effects of swaddling bands and foundation garments as pictured by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Buchan, William Cadogan, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and J. P. Malcolm.

Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her groundbreaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions – for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song – created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This chapter considers the relationship between colonial knowledge, imperial education, and class mobility. British working-class children were not educated for the empire, and British soldiers received almost no country-specific training. Once in India, enlisted men were actively discouraged from developing more than the most basic of language skills. But in spite of gaining no material benefits from learning about India, some non-elite Brits did devote themselves to learning native languages, local religious practices, and further understanding the social world of British India. To do so, they at times crossed boundaries of class and race, developing relationships with native Indians and elite British in the process. The remnants of these educational endeavors include poetry, exam results, scrapbooks, and hand-illustrated glossaries through which non-elites constructed their own forms of colonial knowledge. But autodidacts failed to translate this learning or these new relationships into material gain because the governing institutions of the Raj could not conceive of the utility of colonial knowledge for this class.

Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her groundbreaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions – for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song – created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This chapter examines how working-class women born in Britain and their India-raised daughters understood domestic service. The slipperiness of status in India was most visible in the presence of servants in the homes and workspaces of British of all classes. Working-class women, many of whom had worked as servants themselves before coming to India, found themselves transformed into mistresses upon arrival in the country. Women could assign their domestic duties to servants, take them up again when they chose, and even take on roles as servants themselves. These changes in relationship to service came about not just as the result of changing financial circumstances, but in response to causes as disparate as the birth of a child or a change in the season. Working-class women born in Britain tended to see their status as employers as unstable, but that instability did not necessarily provoke anxieties over racial degeneration. Girls raised, educated, and remaining in India balked at the notion of going into domestic service, even as the schools designed to educate them attempted to train this second generation for that purpose.

What does the caricature talk of the Romantic period have to do with literary criticism’s persistent notion of ‘caricature’ as a technique or style of characterisation in an author’s work? Does caricature have a formal existence, a set of stylistic markers, which can be identified in fictive characters across literary works?