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Author: Jill Rappoport Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192867261 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 226
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.
Author: Jill Rappoport Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192692860 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 226
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.
Author: Noa Reich Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1666938378 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Finance, Family, and the Law investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance. While recent criticism has concentrated on this fiction’s engagement with newer financial forms, this book contends that Victorian novels both attest to the persistence of inheritance and reveal its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. Focusing on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale¬ (1866), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), each chapter explores a recurring pattern of contrast and conflation between inheritance and financial speculation. Taking an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, Reich shows how this pattern gives narrative shape to concerns that were also emerging in contemporary political and legal debates around succession, bequest, landed estates, and conceptions of the family. Attending to the novels’ concrete and figurative allusions to these forms as well as their tentative alternatives, Reich also illustrates how the novels’ self-reflexive subversion of both characters and readers’ expectations based on inheritance conventions challenge our modes of reading. Inheritance and Speculation thus not only illuminates the integral role played by inheritance in Victorian fiction’s mediation of the credit economy, but also offers a new understanding of the complex role of convention in this fiction.
Author: Professor Deborah Wynne Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 1409476286 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 192
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.
Author: Jill Rappoport Publisher: ISBN: 9780191959356 Category : Electronic books Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels to show how a substantial redistribution of wealth was complicated by competing cultural traditions. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of England's largest economic transformations as well as one of its most significant challenges to family customs. By the end of this period, wives who had once lost their common-law property rights to husbands regained economic agency, forever altering the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock. Yet legal rights frequently clashed with other family claims, and the reallocation of wealth affected far more than marriage. In nineteenth-century fiction, women's claims to ownership provide insight into the larger social networks forged through property transactions and also offer a lens to examine other social matters, including wills and copyright; evolution; the twin dangers of greed and generosity; inheritance and custody rights; the economic ramifications of family obligation; and the legacy of nineteenth-century economic practices for women today. 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. 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.
Author: Karen F. Tatum Publisher: ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
This book examines the causes of the abject response in canonical novels, such as Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley's Secret. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject's primal, psychological relation to the mother. The author suggests that these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which are called abject response. By developing Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as a model for reading physical acts of violence against women, the book yields specific answers to its overriding questions: why was a female body so threatening in nineteenth-century fiction? The answer lies in social constructions of women as powers of horror, which the male subject imbibes and which lead to domestic violence if improperly balanced.
Author: Lillian Craton Publisher: Cambria Press ISBN: 1604976535 Category : Literary Criticism & Collections Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
"The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.
Author: Margaret W. Ferguson Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 9780802087577 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England turns to these points of departure for the study of women's legal status and property relationships in the early modern period.
Author: Jan Cohn Publisher: Durham : Duke University Press ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Romance and the Erotics of Property examines contemporary popular romance from a number of different points of view, probing for codes and subtexts that sometimes exploit and sometimes contradict its surface tale of romantic attraction, frustration, longing, and fulfillment. Cohn argues that a full understanding of the contemporary romance requires an investigation of its literary and historical sources and analogues. Three principal sources are examined in the context of women's history in bourgeois society. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Erye, and Gone With the Wind demonstrate the development of romance fiction's themes, yet in all three the central love story is complicated by issues of property, the sign of male power. Jan Cohn further considers the development of the genre n the fictions of Harriet Lewis and May Agnes Fleming, prolific and popular American romance writers of the late nineteenth century who developed the role of the villain, thereby bringing into focus the sexual and economic struggles faced by the heroine. Romance and the Erotics of Property sets romance fiction against a historic and literary background, arguing that contemporary romance disguises as tales of love the subversive fantasies of female appropriation and male property and power.
Author: Dorothy Love Publisher: Thomas Nelson ISBN: 1401687636 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
“There are no secrets that time does not reveal.” Savannah, Georgia – 1858 Celia Browning dreams of the day when her childhood sweetheart Sutton Mackay comes home to Savannah after two years in Jamaica managing his family's shipping interests. Sutton has all but proposed, and their marriage will unite two of the city's most prominent families. But just as Sutton returns, a newspaper reporter arrives in town, determined to pry into twin tragedies that took place at the Browning mansion on Madison Square when Celia was a child. While the journalist pursues his story, someone is trying to frighten Celia. When she receives a series of anonymous notes, and a bracelet imbued with a chilling message, Celia realizes that her family’s past has the power to destroy her future. As the clouds of war gather over Savannah, and her beloved father’s health worsens, Celia determines to uncover the truth about what really happened all those years ago. Inspired by actual events in one of Savannah’s most prominent 19th-century families, The Bracelet is the story of a young southern woman whose dreams fracture under the weight of her family’s tragic past. "Historical romance with a sprinkle of secrets for readers to solve, Dorothy Love's latest puts a new spin on an old idea." —Romantic Times, 4-star review
Author: Jill Rappoport
Author: Jill Rappoport
Author: Noa Reich
Author: Professor Deborah Wynne
Author: Jill Rappoport
Author: Karen F. Tatum
Author: Lillian Craton
Author: Margaret W. Ferguson
Author: Jan Cohn
Author: 
Author: Dorothy Love