The adultery novel, which became a pan-European literary paradigm in the second half of the 19th century, has a fascinating back story. In the wake of the French Revolution, there emerged a slew of secular marriage legislation which produced a metaphorical surplus that is still effective today. Through legal history and canonical literary texts from Rousseau to Goethe and Manzoni to Hugo and Flaubert, "Marriage as a National Fiction" traces how marriage became a figure of reflection for the modern nation-state around 1800. At the same time, law and literature are made fruitful for 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 serviceDeepL.com). The author (with the support of Chris Owain Carter) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.

Autorentext

Dagmar Stöferle is a private lecturer at the Institute of Romance Studies at the LMU Munich.