This book explores the prehistory of the adultery novel as a significant literary theme in 19th-century Europe, examining how marriage became a reflection of the modern nation-state through legal history and classic literary works. It is a translated and revised version of Dagmar Stöferle's original German text.
Represented Law in the Modern Novel
There is a prehistory of the adultery novel, which became a pan-European literary paradigm in the second half of the 19th century. In the wake of the French Revolution, secular marriage legislation emerges, producing a metaphorical surplus that is still effective today. Using legal history and canonical literary texts from Rousseau to Goethe and Manzoni to Hugo and Flaubert, this book traces how marriage around 1800 became a figure of reflection for the modern nation-state. In the process, original contributions to the philology of the individual texts emerge. At the same time, law and literature are made fruitful for a historical semantics of society and community. This book is a translation of an original German 1st edition “Ehe als Nationalfiktion” by Dagmar Stöferle, published by J. B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL. com). The author (with the support of Chris Owain Carter) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.
Das Buch untersucht die Vorgeschichte des Ehebruchromans und dessen Entwicklung im 19. Jahrhundert als europäisches literarisches Paradigma. Es analysiert die Auswirkungen der französischen Ehegesetzgebung auf die Literatur von Rousseau bis Flaubert und beleuchtet die Beziehung zwischen Recht, Literatur und Gesellschaft.