Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property

Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property PDF Author: Wolfram Schmidgen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434829
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Wolfram Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyse the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction. His study argues that such descriptions are important to the British imagination of community. By making visible what it means to own something, they illuminate how competing concepts of property define the boundaries of the individual, of social community, and of political systems. In this way, Schmidgen recovers description as a major feature of eighteenth-century prose, and he makes his case across a wide range of authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Ann Radcliffe. The book's most incisive theoretical contribution lies in its careful insistence on the unity of the human and the material: in Schmidgen's argument, persons and things are inescapably entangled. This approach produces fresh insights into the relationship between law, literature, and economics.

Property and Possession

Property and Possession PDF Author: Susan Ethel Paterson Glover
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Property and Possession, Law, Land, and Early Eighteenth-century English Fiction, 1700-1735

Property and Possession, Law, Land, and Early Eighteenth-century English Fiction, 1700-1735 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Engendering Legitimacy

Engendering Legitimacy PDF Author: Susan Glover
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction is a study of the intersecting of law, land, property, and gender in the prose fiction of Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Jonathan Swift. The law of property in early modern England established relations for men and women that artificially constructed, altered, and ended their connections with the material world, and the land they lived upon. The cultural role of land and law in a changing economy embracing new forms of property became a founding preoccupation around which grew the imaginative prose fiction that would develop into the English novel. Glover contends that questions of political and legal legitimacy raised by England's Revolution of 1688-89 were transposed to the domestic and literary spheres of the early 1700s.

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature PDF Author: Cheryl L. Nixon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317021940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Cheryl Nixon's book is the first to connect the eighteenth-century fictional orphan and factual orphan, emphasizing the legal concepts of estate, blood, and body. Examining novels by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and referencing never-before analyzed case records, Nixon reconstructs the narratives of real orphans in the British parliamentary, equity, and common law courts and compares them to the narratives of fictional orphans. The orphan's uncertain economic, familial, and bodily status creates opportunities to "plot" his or her future according to new ideologies of the social individual. Nixon demonstrates that the orphan encourages both fact and fiction to re-imagine structures of estate (property and inheritance), blood (familial origins and marriage), and body (gender and class mobility). Whereas studies of the orphan typically emphasize the poor urban foundling, Nixon focuses on the orphaned heir or heiress and his or her need to be situated in a domestic space. Arguing that the eighteenth century constructs the "valued" orphan, Nixon shows how the wealthy orphan became associated with new understandings of the individual. New archival research encompassing print and manuscript records from Parliament, Chancery, Exchequer, and King's Bench demonstrate the law's interest in the propertied orphan. The novel uses this figure to question the formulaic structures of narrative sub-genres such as the picaresque and romance and ultimately encourage the hybridization of such plots. As Nixon traces the orphan's contribution to the developing novel and developing ideology of the individual, she shows how the orphan creates factual and fictional understandings of class, family, and gender.

Property, Education and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Property, Education and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: V. Cope
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230239544
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
This book recovers the importance of a major figure in eighteenth-century British fiction: the Heroine of Disinterest. The disinterested heroine was no stereotype but a crucial figure in modernizing identity, bringing to life the ideal of character as the product of experience and reflection rather than inheritance and lineage.

Drone Enlightenment

Drone Enlightenment PDF Author: Peter DeGabriele
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813949556
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Drone warfare raises far-reaching questions about responsibility, war, and sovereignty. Who can be held accountable for drone strikes? Do drones conduct wars of national territories and sovereign boundaries? What does the occupation of a land or people look like if there are no boots on the ground? Focusing specifically on the United States' use of killer drones during the War on Terror, Drone Enlightenment argues that this kind of warfare has its intellectual, ideological, and practical roots in the way the Enlightenment imagined moral agency, occupation, race, and sovereignty. As a consequence of seeing drone warfare as a creature of the Enlightenment, and through innovative readings of Hobbes, Locke, Grotius, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, and Swift, the book also reevaluates the Enlightenment itself.

Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain During the War for America, 1770-1785

Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain During the War for America, 1770-1785 PDF Author: Robert W. Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107007895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
A new interdisciplinary perspective on masculine identity and politics in Britain during the American War of Independence, 1775-83.

Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson

Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson PDF Author: Bonnie Latimer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317102401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Proposing that Samuel Richardson's novels were crucial for the construction of female individuality in the mid-eighteenth century, Bonnie Latimer shows that Richardson's heroines are uniquely conceived as individuals who embody the agency and self-determination implied by that term. In addition to placing Richardson within the context of his own culture, recouping for contemporary readers the influence of Grandison on later writers, including Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Scott, and Mary Wollstonecraft, is central to her study. Latimer argues that Grandison has been unfairly marginalised in favor of Clarissa and Pamela, and suggests that a rigorous rereading of the novel not only provides a basis for reassessing significant aspects of Richardson's fictional oeuvre, but also has implications for fresh thinking about the eighteenth-century novel. Latimer's study is not a specialist study of Grandison but rather a reconsideration of Richardson's novelistic canon that places Grandison at its centre as Richardson's final word on his re-envisioning of the gendered self.

Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: Jolene Zigarovich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136182365
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.