The Bigamy Plot PDF Download

Author: Maia McAleavey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316368882
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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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.

Author: Kelly Hager
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317151178
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Questioning a literary history that, since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, has privileged the courtship plot, Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager maps the legal history of marriage and divorce, providing crucial background as she reveals the prevalence of the failed-marriage plot in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels. Dickens's novels emerge as representative case studies in their preoccupations with the disintegration of marriage, the far-reaching and disastrous effects of the doctrine of coverture, and the comic, spectacular, and monstrous possibilities afforded by the failed-marriage plot. Setting his narratives alongside the writings of liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill and the seemingly conservative agendas of Caroline Norton, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Sarah Stickney Ellis, Hager also offers a more contextualized account of the competing strands of the Woman Question. In the course of her revisionist readings of Dickens's novels, Hager uncovers a Dickens who is neither the conservative agent of the patriarchy nor a novelistic Jeremy Bentham, and reveals that tipping the marriage plot on its head forces us to adjust our understanding of the complexities of Victorian proto-feminism.

Author: Mary Turner Thomson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1780572727
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In April 2006, Mary Turner Thomson received a call that blew her life apart. The woman on the other end of the line told her that Will Jordan, Mary's husband and the father of her two younger children, had been married to her for fourteen years and they had five children together. The Bigamist is the shocking true story of how one man manipulated an intelligent, independent woman, conning her out of £200,000 and leaving her to bring up the children he claimed he could never have. It's a story we all think could never happen to us, but this shameless con man has been doing the same thing to various other women for at least 27 years, spinning a tangled web of lies and deceit to cover his tracks. How far would you go to help the man you love? How far would he go to deceive you? And what would you do when you found out it was all a lie?

Author: Tayari Jones
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1786077973
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A breathtaking tale of family secrets, from the international bestselling author of An American Marriage AN OBSERVER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A SAINSBURY'S MAGAZINE CHRISTMAS GIFT LISTING A GUARDIAN 'BEST BOOK OF 2020 TO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS' A BOOKSELLER SMALL PUBLISHERS 2020 TOP 20 A Most Anticipated Book for 2020 according to The Sunday Times, the FT and the Guardian 'My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.' SECRETS Dana and Chaurisse are sisters, bound together by the life-changing secret of their father's double life. LIES Only one of them knows the truth. When they do finally meet and form a friendship, the fragile balance of ignorance and silence that has kept James' secrets safe for so long threatens to explode. HOPE This soulful story of friendship and sisterhood paints an unforgettable picture of the messy knots that bind families together, from the prize-winning author of An American Marriage.

Author: Jessica Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350309486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Since the establishment of sensation fiction in the 1860s, key trends have emerged in critical readings of these texts. From Victorian responses emphasising the 'lowbrow' or potentially dangerous qualities of the genre to the prolific critical attention of the present day, this Reader's Guide identifies the dominant approaches to sensation fiction and charts the critical trends of various scholarly evaluations and interpretations. With coverage spanning empire, class, sexuality and adaptation, this is the ideal companion for students of Victorian Literature looking for an introduction to the key debates surrounding sensation fiction.

Author: Wilkie Collins
Publisher: IndyPublish.com
ISBN: 9781437898781
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
Man and Wife (1870) combines the fast pace and sensational plot structure of Collins's most famous novels with a biting attack on the inequitable marriage laws in Victorian Britain. At its centre is the plight of a woman who fears that the archaic marriage laws of Scotland and Ireland may have forced her into committing unintentional bigamy. As the novel progresses, the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister when the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

Author: Jasmine Cresswell
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1460304810
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
For twenty-five years, multimillionaire businessman Ron Raven played the loving husband and father -- to two very different households. But when Ron disappears, his deception is revealed. Now both families are left with questions, while the man who holds the answers is...MISSING. Megan Raven is desperate to save her mother's Wyoming ranch, used as collateral on a three-million-dollar loan -- money that disappeared with Ron. Worse, the loan is being called in by Georgia bank manager Adam Fairfax -- brother to Ron's other wife. Brought together by their families' turmoil, Megan and Adam head south of the border in search of the missing millions. But what they find is a whole new web of lies, secrecy and greed.

Author: Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.

Author: F.E. Mills Young
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 9361150790
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
F. E. Mills Young "The Bigamist" is a dramatic tale that delves into the ramifications of a person's engagement in a complex internet of love relationships. The plot revolves around the main person, who will become involved inside the act of bigamy through marrying ladies at the same time. As the tale progresses, the writer expertly navigates the protagonist's complex feelings and tensions stemming from his twin lifestyles. The paintings dig into the moral quandaries, cultural judgments, and personal issues encountered by means of the protagonists on this uncommon and morally complex scenario. Through "The Bigamist," F. E. Mills Young affords readers with an idea-provoking exploration of human relationships, morality, and cultural requirements. The work will maximum likely blend components of romance, drama, and social statement to supply a charming story that asks readers to bear in mind the complexity of love and morality. With its study of the consequences of bigamy, the radical has the ability to provide readers with a captivating and emotionally charged tale that questions traditional ideas of relationships and social expectancies.

Author: Lyn Pykett
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
ISBN: 0746312121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This clearly written and wide-ranging study identifies the main features of the sensation novel, analysing its broader cultural significance as well as looking at it in its specific cultural context.