Relationship scientists have focused on dimensions of relationship dynamics and processes including initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution, yet most of this research is decontextualized, especially as it pertains to race and racism. Among the relationship research that accounts for race, the treatment of race as a factor to be controlled or as a comparison variable ignores the realities of racism as a system that historically influenced and continues to shape romantic relationship development and functioning. Thus, the primary aim of this chapter is to investigate how systemic racism shifts our understanding of romantic relationships by providing an integrative review and critique of the existing literature using Black romantic relationships as an exemplar. We conclude with recommendations for future relationship science across five key domains: conceptualization and theory, measurement, privilege exploration, and within-group heterogeneity.

Stress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic can threaten the ability to successfully maintain established romantic relationships as well as navigate the initiation and development of new relationships. Drawing on the vulnerability-stress-adaptation (VSA) model, we propose that the extent to which pandemic-related stress will undermine couples’ relationships, as well as the initiation of new relationships, will depend on the amount and severity of pandemic-related and preexisting levels of stress combined with enduring personal vulnerabilities such as attachment insecurity. We review a growing body of research examining relationship processes and functioning prior to and during the initial stages of the pandemic that provides evidence consistent with this framework and draws on related research suggesting routes to minimize relationship disruptions and promote resilience. In addition, we review newly emerging research examining how pandemic-related stress might impact the initiation of relationships. Finally, we discuss several directions for future research to facilitate an understanding of the longer-term implications of the pandemic for ongoing and newly developing romantic relationships.

The third chapter suggests that The Spectator’s characters set important precedents of diversion, originality and realism for the caricature talk that constituted realist character in the critical recognition and writing of the Romantic novel. The second part of the chapter shows how anti-caricature rhetoric became conventionalised in late eighteenth-century essays that sought to explain and promote the appeal of Addison and Steele’s character ’Sir Roger De Coverley’.

Although there have been attempts to make relationship science more diverse and inclusive, as it stands, the external sociocultural forces that impact relationships have not been at the forefront of research. We argue that romantic relationships cannot be divorced from the sociocultural context in which they exist. This chapter reviews the literature to explain the “context problem” faced by relationship science, highlighting the importance of including intersectional, context-driven research in the field. We then provide an overview of each chapter in the volume.

This chapter introduces five families whose histories each exemplify parts of the British non-elite experience of India. The Keen and Wonnacott families experienced opposing forms of social mobility in India where their social status, bolstered by the presence of native labor and constrained by the strictures of military hierarchy, changed dramatically. John Brand waited with his regiment for a conflict to fight in, experiencing India, like many other soldiers, as a place of stasis and sickness. Ned Crawford, who came to India as his search for work along the east coast of Britain failed and expanded to the empire, sought to maintain connections to both his brother and British political culture. And George and Lucy Cole, whose marriage suffered when George sought employment in India, reveal the effects Indian service could have on family units across imperial distance. These themes of upward and downward mobility, attempts to create community, both local and intraimperial, and the fallout of Indian and imperial separation on intimate relationships recur throughout the book.

Chapter 4 examines how the direct linguistic environment of a lexeme affects its interpretation. In keeping with the constructionist approach, this means looking into the interaction between lexemes and the various types of constructions in which they are found. First, examples of coercion are considered. Though semantically triggered, it is argued that such examples are pragmatically resolved and do not require a process distinct from lexically regulated saturation (Leclercq, 2019). The pragmatic roots of coercion are related to the “procedural function” of the “grammatical constructions” involved, two concepts whose definitions are carefully reviewed. It is argued that grammatical constructions serve only to assist the interpretation process. Second, attention is given to more idiomatic constructions in which lexemes are also found. The interpretation of these constructions is said to follow from a parallel, context-sensitive process guided by considerations of relevance that may suspend lexically regulated saturation. Overall, Chapter 4 sheds light on the complex ways in which lexical meaning comes about.

This is the first of three chapters showing how caricature talk co-operates with characterisation techniques in genre-defining novels of the Romantic period. I give an account of anti-caricature rhetoric in the critical reception of Jane Austen’s novels, from contemporaneous reviews and responses to the twentieth century. I describe Austen’s particular moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-indulgence, first examining instances of the word ’caricature’ in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, then close-reading depictions of fat bodies in Persuasion and Sanditon, as instances of literary realism’s ’explained caricatures’.

The fifth chapter explores how concepts of caricature interacted with historical romance in the critical reception and writing of Walter Scott’s characters. I explore Scott’s association of pictorial caricature with accuracy, particularity and referentiality, looking in particular at The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Guy Mannering, and suggesting the implications of John Kay’s caricatures for Scott’s ’compendious realism’. Scott’s defences of historical ’caricature’ – in his essay on Tobias Smollett and in the Magnum Opus edition of The Monastery – are a counterpoint to the anti-caricature rhetoric used to disparage his novels. Returning to the realist device of the ’explained caricature’, I differentiate national caricatures of the Scots and Jewish ’body-corporate’ in Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Ivanhoe.

In this chapter, guided by an intersectional feminist theoretical approach, we examine gender and sexuality as ubiquitous ideas in personal identity, intimate relationships, family systems, and social institutions. We critique heteronormativity in relational and family science in order to examine the plethora of relationships formed in the context of gender, identity, and sexuality. We examine how social structures at the macro level and social constructions at the microlevel influence selected issues regarding relationship initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution. We review selected trends in the literature concerning diverse romantic relationships and how they adhere to or critique heteronormative ideologies, thereby, examining ways in which relational partners are both queering and challenging taken for granted assumptions about doing gender and sexuality in relationships.

Romantic relationships occur within a larger social, political, and historic context. Although family historians have attended to the changing social meaning and role of romantic partnering across historical time, few scholars have considered that the psychosocial meanings individuals attribute to historic events may shape romantic relationships dynamics. In this chapter, we consider how linkages between historic events and shifts in the socio-political environment of the United States may influence romantic relationships. We begin by reviewing the work of family historians before discussing theories and concepts relevant to examining romantic partnering within a historical context. We provide illustrative examples to highlight the overlap between cohort and historic effects across relationship initiation, maintenance, and dissolution. We conclude by reflecting on the conceptual and empirical challenges and possibilities associated with examining relationships from a historical perspective.

Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her groundbreaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions – for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song – created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This book begins with a family that does not fit. Pollie Keen was born to a Buckinghamshire washerwoman. She spent her teenage years as a servant, married a farm laborer-turned-soldier, and lived out her late twenties as a lady of leisure, flitting between tea parties, carriage rides, and dances that lasted into the early hours of the morning. In 1889, Pollie, her three children, and her husband Dick, by then a sergeant with the Royal Horse Artillery, went to India. It was once the family had settled in Sialkot in Punjab that Pollie’s social status and material world changed so dramatically. Dick wrote to his brother that the family was enjoying the “fine country” and enumerated the servants at their disposal. “I am same [sic] like gentleman. We are both in bed when the cook comes in to light the fire, lay the breakfast and all ready before we get up, and the barber taps at the door to shave me and man is waiting to clean the boots and clothes for all of us.”1 Having fires laid, shoes polished, breakfast made, and a barber at the ready were luxuries Dick and Pollie could never reasonably have hoped for in Britain. Pollie bragged to her mother that, after a lifetime of domestic labor, her only duties were dusting and changing the bed linens.2