Imagining Women S Property In Victorian Fiction

Author : Jill Rappoport
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2023
Category : Electronic books
ISBN : 0191959359

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Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction by Jill Rappoport Pdf

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 : Jill Rappoport
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2023-03-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192692863

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Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction by Jill Rappoport Pdf

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 : Tim Dolin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351917209

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Mistress of the House by Tim Dolin Pdf

This exploration of gender and property ownership in eight important novels argues that property is a decisive undercurrent in narrative structures and modes, as well as an important gender signature in society and culture. Tim Dolin suggests that the formal development of nineteenth-century domestic fiction can only be understood in the context of changes in the theory and laws of property: indeed femininity and its representation cannot be considered separately from property relations and their reform. He presents original readings of novels in which a woman owns, acquires or loses property, focusing on exchanges between patriarchal cultural authority, the 'woman question' and narrative form, and on the place of domestic fiction in a culture in which property relations and gender relations are subject to radical review. Each chapter revolves around a representative text, but refers substantially to other material, both other novels and contemporary social, legal, political and feminist commentary.

Author : Deborah Wynne
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2016-02-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134772407

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Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel by Deborah Wynne Pdf

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 : Lisa Anne Surridge
Publisher : Ohio University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Abused women in literature
ISBN : 9780821416426

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Bleak Houses by Lisa Anne Surridge Pdf

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Author : Philip O'Neill
Publisher : Springer
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 1988-06-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781349089000

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Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety by Philip O'Neill Pdf

Almost on the centenary of his death, this book studies the novels of Wilkie Collins and attempts to appreciate his representation of Victorian mores. It pays particular attention to Collins' views on sexuality, both male and female, and the laws concerning the distribution of property.

Author : Karen F. Tatum
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : IND:30000109211676

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Explaining the Depiction of Violence Against Women in Victorian Literature by Karen F. Tatum Pdf

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 : Béatrice Laurent
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : History
ISBN : 1789974879

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Water and Women in the Victorian Imagination by Béatrice Laurent Pdf

During the Victorian period, naturally wet spaces like rivers and the sea were construed as feminised, embodying either the angelic Undine or the demonic Siren. This study of a unique collection of materials explores the development of the mythical 'water woman' of the time.

Author : Lillian Craton
Publisher : Cambria Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism & Collections
ISBN : 9781604976533

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The Victorian Freak Show by Lillian Craton Pdf

"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 : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 530 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2009-09
Category : Dissertations, Academic
ISBN : STANFORD:36105213180891

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Dissertation Abstracts International by Anonim Pdf

Author : Jenni Calder
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : STANFORD:36105005299420

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Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction by Jenni Calder Pdf

Author : Margaret W. Ferguson,A. R. Buck,Nancy E. Wright
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0802087574

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Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England by Margaret W. Ferguson,A. R. Buck,Nancy E. Wright Pdf

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 : Shirley Foster
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : English fiction
ISBN : 0415526426

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Victorian Women's Fiction by Shirley Foster Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 672 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Arts, Victorian
ISBN : IND:30000117409585

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Victorian Literature and Culture by Anonim Pdf

Author : Murray Baumgarten,Hillel Matthew Daleski
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015048921749

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Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination by Murray Baumgarten,Hillel Matthew Daleski Pdf

The essays in this volume deal centrally with Dickens's images of homelessness, but also with those of other Victorians also - Disraeli, Mrs Gaskell, Israel Zangwill, John Ruskin and Henry James. The issues addressed by these Victorians are the same as those we face today.