“Reader, I Married Him”: Readership, Imagination, and Politics of the Marriage Plot in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Here's the abstract:

This project explores how the nineteenth-century marriage plot, beyond being merely a genre trope, functions as an affective narrative structure for readers, and, therefore, helps to emotionally transform readers into political actors. By evaluating key literary works alongside new theoretical viewpoints from affect, feminist, queer, and popular romance scholars, I identify how this neglected area of scholarship offers a compelling glimpse into why and how fiction shapes readers. Each chapter traces how the marriage plot engages emotionally with readers, beginning with Austen’s manipulation of the reader through free indirect discourse in Emma, through Gaskell’s deployment of point-of-view and the gaze in North and South, and in Middlemarch, Eliot’s expansion of the nineteenth-century conceptualization of intimacy through narrative catharsis. I conclude by demonstrating how current mass-market romance novels set in the nineteenth century continue this emotional and political work on contemporary readers. Drawing on archival letters from romance readers to authors, I examine how romance novels create transhistorical, affective ties between the political issues of the nineteenth century and the present day. I argue that love stories in the nineteenth century novel as well as in its modern descendent, the mass-market romance novel, transform the personal politics of readers by engaging their emotions and allowing them a space to imagine and shape more just futures.