Connubial Fictions: The Evolution of Marriage in American Law and Literature

Connubial Fictions explores law and marriage in the United States, seen through the lens of American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this edited volume, scholars of law and the humanities combine legal scholarship with literary analysis to explore how American literature has portrayed marriage's complex legal dimensions over time. They cover diverse fictional works including Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead novels, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and works by Edward Albee, Philip Roth, Octavia Butler, Maggie Nelson, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Through these works, contributors examine a wide range of legal and literary themes: the true ownership of a marriage, how investments involved in a marriage compare to investments in a business, how the denial of marriage rights affected same-sex couples, how marriage rights changed queer aesthetics, the prospects for truth in marriage, the constraints and possibilities for immigrant marriages, how procreation norms affect childless marriages, the challenges of interracial intimacy and marriage, the paucity of modern literature depicting interracial marriages, the nature of separations before no-fault divorce, the divorce revolution and the best interests of children of divorce, and the problem of equality and alimony.

Convention and law have often shielded the intimate aspect of marriage from public view. This volume shows how literature has pulled back the curtain and shown us the various lived experiences of marriage, of all kinds.