The Anti-Marriage Plot in the Age of Informal Empire, 1850-1930

In "The Anti-Marriage Plot in the Age of Informal Empire, 1850-1930," I argue that a new type of imperial novel emerged in the nineteenth century where marriage and its adjacent forms—alliance, coalition, union, association—became extraordinarily fraught proxies for understanding a convoluted, Anglo-centric world-system. In reading novels by José Mármol (Amalia), Anthony Trollope (The Prime Minister), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Aves sin nido), Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World), and Benito Lynch (El inglés de los güesos), I find that something curious happens in texts where the marriage plot intersects with the material infrastructures—ports, railroads, storehouses—and spatial or characterological expressions of Britain's informal (or economic) empire in Latin America. Instead of solidifying national identity, spurring progress, or neatly ordering narrative and imperial worlds, the marriage plot exerts an unexpectedly corrosive, disaggregating, and disorienting effect. Desire fails and often fails spectacularly, leaving trails of dismembered bodies, fractured unions, and distorted flesh in its wake. Indeed, marriage plots fracture and collapse so violently as to result in what I call an anti-marriage plot. When a potential transatlantic network between Britain and South America enters the narrative, characters and their drives toward union implode, fundamentally altering domestic and foreign alliance, reorienting the trajectory of imperial relationality, and catalyzing chaos in the novel's portrayal of time, space, and flesh.

Author dc:creator

• Nielsen, Jacob, Kurt

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Steinlight, Emily

• Arts and Humanities
• British and Irish literature
• Latin American Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62836

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62836