Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel

Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Deborah Wynne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134772408
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.

Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel

Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Deborah Wynne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134772408
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.

Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel

Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Professor Deborah Wynne
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409476286
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.

Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel

Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Deborah Wynne
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754667667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900 that reveals how key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to fresh ways of viewing women in society. It argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period.

History and Ideology in Charles Dickens’s and Orhan Kemal’s Selected Novels

History and Ideology in Charles Dickens’s and Orhan Kemal’s Selected Novels PDF Author: Erol Gülüştür
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527529967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
History and ideology are important concepts to consider when going through a literary work. Since ancient times, they have been key tools for the examination of literature. By means of these two concepts, a given work is analyzed and evaluated more profoundly. Both English and Turkish literature show traces of history and contesting ideologies. Charles Dickens and Orhan Kemal are prominent authors, the works of whom reveal the historical and ideological background of their respective contexts. This book extensively accounts for history and Althusser's ideology in Charles Dickens's and Orhan Kemal's selected novels.

Primitive Marriage

Primitive Marriage PDF Author: Kathy Alexis Psomiades
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019286372X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Marriage is the novel's traditional subject matter. But what happens to the novel when another genre of writing lays claim to the novel's traditional material? Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity shows how the foundational ideas of the new discipline of anthropology gave late-Victorian novelists and social scientists ways of rethinking heterosexual romance by referring to a new kind of history, one in which marriage systems, sexual behavior, and reproductive practices were temporalized and given historical agency. Temporalizing sexual relations, locating them in evolutionary and historical time, anthropologists and the novelists who wrote after them began to think modernity in sexual terms. This transformation of politics into sexual politics put sexuality and gender at the center of liberal stories of progress. The Victorian theorists responsible for this transformation--from well-known figures like Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud to lesser-known writers like John McLennan and Henry Maine--and the novelists who engaged them--Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Henry James, Sarah Grand, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy--not only helped produce sexually modern subjects, but also the theories about sexuality, time, and politics that we still draw upon to think modernity today.

Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture PDF Author: K. Boehm
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137283653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This book provides fresh perspectives on the object world, embodied experience and materiality in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Contributors explore canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens and James, alongside less-familiar texts and a range of objects including nineteenth-century automata, scrapbooks, museum exhibits and antiques.

George Eliot and Money

George Eliot and Money PDF Author: Dermot Coleman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107057213
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book examines George Eliot's understanding of money and economics within the context of the ethics of economics in nineteenth-century England.

Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction

Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Jill Rappoport
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692860
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. By the end of this period, women who had once lost their common-law property rights to their husbands reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in literary accounts, reforms were neither as decisive as the law implied nor limited to marriage. Legal rights frequently clashed with other family claims, and the reallocation of wealth affected far more than spouses or the marital state. Competition between wives and children is just one of many ways in which Victorian fiction suggests the perceived benefits and threats of property reform. In nineteenth-century fiction, portrayals of women's claims to ownership provide insight into the social networks forged through property transactions and also offer a lens to examine a wide range of other social matters, including testamentary practices, wills, and copyright law; economic and evolutionary models of mutuality; the twin dangers of greed and generosity; inheritance and custody rights; the economic ramifications of loyalty and family obligation; and the legacy of nineteenth-century economic practices for women today. Understanding the reform of married women's property as both an ideologically and materially substantial redistribution of the nation's wealth as well as one complicated by competing cultural traditions, this book explores the widespread ways in which women's financial agency was imagined by fiction that engages with but also diverges from the law in accounts of economic choices and transactions. Repeatedly, narratives by Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, and Oliphant suggest both that the law is inadequate to account for the way that property enables and disrupts relationships, and that the form of the Victorian novel - in its ability to track intimate and intricate exchanges across generations - is better suited to such tasks.

For Better, For Worse

For Better, For Worse PDF Author: Carolyn Lambert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351855360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume explores the fictional portrayal of marriage by women novelists between 1800 and 1900. It investigates the ways in which these novelists used the cultural form of the novel to engage with and contribute to the wider debates of the period around the fundamental cultural and social building block of marriage. The collection provides an important contribution to the emerging scholarly interest in nineteenth-century marriage, gender studies, and domesticity, opening up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. An initial chapter outlines the public discourses around marriage in the nineteenth century, the legal reforms that were achieved as a result of public pressure, and the ways in which these laws and economic concerns impacted on the marital relationship. It beds the collection down in current critical thinking and draws on life writing, journalism, and conduct books to widen our understanding of how women responded to the ideological and cultural construct of marriage. Further chapters examine a range of texts by lesser-known writers as well as canonical authors structured around a timeline of the major legal reforms that impacted on marriage. This structure provides a clear framework for the collection, locating it firmly within contemporary debate and foregrounding female voices. An afterword reflects back on the topic of marriage in the nineteenth- century and considers how the activism of the period influenced and shaped reform post-1900. This volume will make an important contribution to scholarship on Victorian Literature, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Nineteenth Century.

Helena Normanton and the Opening of the Bar to Women

Helena Normanton and the Opening of the Bar to Women PDF Author: Judith Bourne
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 1909976326
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In this first full-length account of Helena Normanton’s life and career, Judith Bourne tells of her fight to join the Bar of England and Wales and open it up to women. Helena Normanton and the Opening of the Bar to Women describes how her ambition was forged as a child after seeing her mother patronised by a solicitor. It tells how the press were quick to pigeon-hole and harass her, leading to disciplinary proceedings for ‘self-advertising’. Enmeshed in a world of men, Helena Normanton faced a constant struggle to establish herself against a backdrop of prejudice, misogyny and discrimination. The book describes how solicitors, fearful of the unknown, were reluctant to instruct her, leaving her to take on poor person’s cases, dock briefs and those few cases ‘deemed suitable for a woman’. But Helena Normanton was a force to be reckoned with. She was not just the first woman to be admitted to an Inn of Court, hold briefs in the High Court and Old Bailey, and (as one of two women) be made a King’s Counsel, but a prolific author, leading feminist and speaker who entranced audiences at home and abroad. Along with the controversies that eternally surrounded her and her own foibles, this is all contained in this captivating book. Reviews '[ An ] excellent biography of Helena Normanton, brilliantly researched by Judith Bourne... a captivating book for all aspiring barristers to read'-- Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers. ‘Bourne has succeeded in rendering Normanton as a human being, a woman with grit and aspiration, whose experiences were as often disappointing as celebratory in the context of her time and place’-- Professor Mary Jane Mossman (from the Foreword)