Roulston (women's studies and French studies, U. of Western Ontario) analyzes what happens once a courtship leads to married life, or at least how that transition was depicted in novels, advice
literature, and other cultural productions in English and French during the 18th century. She finds that marriage tends to form the background of the bourgeois novel upon which the real action
takes place, but is rarely much elaborated itself. Her topics are advice literature and the meaning of marriage, accounting for marriage, marriage and the colonial imagination, disrupting wives
and the balance of power, narrative wife-abuse, and having it both ways in the 18th-century m矇nage-�-trois. Annotation 穢2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
