Love against Substitution

Seventeenth-Century English Literature and the Meaning of Marriage

Eric B. Song

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781503631403, 9781503630444
• eBook ISBN: 9781503631410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

Are we unique as individuals, or are we replaceable? Seventeenth-century English literature pursues these questions through depictions of marriage. The writings studied in this book elevate a love between two individuals who deem each other to be unique to the point of being irreplaceable, and this vocabulary allows writers to put affective pressure on the meaning of marriage as Pauline theology defines it. Stubbornly individual, love threatens to short-circuit marriage's function in directing intimate feelings toward a communal experience of Christ's love.

The literary project of testing the meaning of marriage proved to be urgent work throughout the seventeenth century. Monarchy itself was put on trial in this century, and so was the usefulness of marriage in linking Christian belief with the legitimacy of hereditary succession. Starting at the end of the sixteenth century with Edmund Spenser, and then exploring works by William Shakespeare, William Davenant, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, Eric Song offers a new account of how notions of unique personhood became embedded in a literary way of thinking and feeling about marriage.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Beguiling Love in the Amoretti and the 1590 Faerie Queene
• 2. Jealousy against Substitution in Othello and The Winter’s Tale
• 3. Gondibert and the Biopolitics of Marriage
• 4. Love against Succession in Paradise Lost
• 5. Lucy Hutchinson and the Imperfection of Christian Marriage
• 6. From Remarriage to Tragic Fungibility: Behn’s The Forc’d Marriage and Oroonoko
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Series List