Butterfly, the Bride

Angebote / Angebote:

Beginning with a story most familiar to us in the opera "Madame Butterfly, Carol Weisbrod uses a variety of stories to illuminate important issues in how society, through law, defines important relationships in the family. The book addresses such important issues as marriage, divorce, parent-child relations and abuses, and nonmarital intimate contacts. Each chapter works with fictional literature or narratives inspired by biography or myth, ranging from the Book of Esther to Kafka to memoirs of family life. The book is joined by a running commentary on "Madame Butterfly and variations on that story. These commentaries on variations on the Butterfly story that begin each chapter wonderfully exhibit the author's argument that fictional material better expresses the complexity of intimate lives than the crude simplicities of the law. The author looks at law from the outside, using narratives to provide a perspective on the issues of law and social structure--and individual responses to law. This book explores the relationships between the inner life and the public through an examination of what is ordinarily classified as the sphere of "private life, " the world of family relationships.This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners concerned with families and the laws relating to marriage, divorce, and child abuse as well as to scholars interested in law and literature and the use of narratives to understand law.Carol Weisbrod is Ellen Ash Peters Professor of Law, University of Connecticut School of Law. She is a scholar of family law and the author of a recent text on family law as well as of numerous articles on family law and law and literature.