Connubial Fictions

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 Gileadnovels, 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-…