Building on the intellectual and historical context of Darwin's theory of evolution and its questioning of a divine father, this book analyzes the crises of the 19th-century patriarchal family and the gradual rise of the independent woman, and the representations of these phenomena in the works by Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hardy. It also draws from psychoanalytic and feminist sources, and includes a brief discussion of the works of Compte and Taine. Shideler is a professor of comparative literature and Scandinavian Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR