One of the most important issues in literary studies concerns the relation of social ideology to literary form. Tradition Counter Tradition enters into this arena by focusing on the role that the myth of romantic marriage and its attendant ideologies of gender have played in the evolution of the Anglo-American novel over the past three centuries.
Combining an array of historical and theoretical perspectives, the opening chapters demonstrate how the marriage tradition’s structural paradigms of courtship, seduction and wedlock interlock to form a code of formal rules that promote the myth of sexual hierarchy as the basis of social and fictional order.
Following chapters argue for the covert but powerful presence of a “counter tradition” that has systematically undermined the ideological constraints of the love-plot throughout the novel’s history and concurrently challenged the cultural and literary ideal of “happy endings”: the open-ended narrative of uneasy wedlock; the American male quest romance; the non-linear text of the all-female community. The result is compelling reinterpretation of the Anglo-American novel that shifts our ways of thinking about gender and the structure of fiction itself.
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