Women And Personal Property In The Victorian Novel

Author : Deborah Wynne
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 43,8 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 : Tim Dolin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 42,9 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 : Jill Rappoport
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,7 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 : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2023
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780192867261

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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 : Hanne Birk,Marion Gymnich
Publisher : V&R Unipress
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2015-09-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783847004523

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Pride and Prejudice 2.0 by Hanne Birk,Marion Gymnich Pdf

Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been adapted, transformed and translated into numerous languages. Thus the classic today constitutes an international, transcultural, transmedial and iconic phenomenon of pop culture that transcends genre boundaries as easily as centuries. The vitality of the book at the crossroads of the literary canon and pop culture is analysed by contributions focusing on its translations, Bollywood adaptations, iconic TV versions or vlog adaptations, on erotic rewritings or generic transformations into Chick-Lit, crime fiction or the Gothic mode, on teaching contexts or on a diachronic analysis of its illustrations. Complemented by a compilation of student essays, this volume affirms and celebrates Pride and Prejudice being perhaps more alive than ever before.

Author : Briony McDonagh
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2017-08-14
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781317145110

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Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 by Briony McDonagh Pdf

Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 offers a detailed study of elite women’s relationships with landed property, specifically as they were mediated through the lens of their estate management and improvement. This highly original book provides an explicitly feminist historical geography of the eighteenth-century English rural landscape. It addresses important questions about propertied women’s role in English rural communities and in Georgian society more generally, whilst contributing to wider cultural debates about women’s place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain. It will be of interest to those working in Historical and Cultural Geography, Social, Economic and Cultural History, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and Landscape Studies. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Author : Dermot Coleman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2014-04-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107057210

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George Eliot and Money by Dermot Coleman Pdf

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

Author : K. Boehm
Publisher : Springer
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2016-02-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137283658

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Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by K. Boehm Pdf

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.

Author : Kathy Alexis Psomiades
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2023-03-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192678652

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Primitive Marriage by Kathy Alexis Psomiades Pdf

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.

Author : Emily Ridge
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2017-06-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781474419604

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Portable Modernisms by Emily Ridge Pdf

Luggage is an overlooked detail in the stock sketch of the expatriated modernist writer from the valise-fashioned desks of both James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov to the lost manuscript-laden cases of Ernest Hemingway and Walter Benjamin. While the trope of modernist exile has long been spotlighted, little attention has been given to the material meaning of this condition. What things and objects do modernism's exiles and emigres carry with them and how does the act of carriage enter into the modernist picture more broadly? What are the implications and historical resonances of a portable outlook, particularly from the angles of gender, wartime conflict and character conception? Above all, how far does such an outlook impact upon artistic vision? Portability represents the simultaneous transportation and repudiation of domesticity and the home, those key frames of reference in the nineteenth-century novel. This book examines the multifarious ways in which the emergence of a modern culture of portability prompts a radical, if often problematic, departure from Victorian architectural conceptions of fiction towards more movable understandings of form and character.

Author : Philip O'Neill
Publisher : Springer
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 48,8 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 : Sarah E. Maier,Brenda Ayres,Danielle Mariann Dove
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2022-07-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783031062018

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Neo-Victorian Things by Sarah E. Maier,Brenda Ayres,Danielle Mariann Dove Pdf

Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.

Author : Monica F. Cohen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1998-02-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521591416

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Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel by Monica F. Cohen Pdf

Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Bront , Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.

Author : Jennifer Beauvais
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2020-10-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780786460366

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Domesticated Bachelors and Femininity in Victorian Novels by Jennifer Beauvais Pdf

Domestic issues, chastity, morality, marriage and love are concerns we typically associate with Victorian female characters. But what happens when men in Victorian novels begin to engage in this type of feminine discourse? While we are familiar with certain Victorian women seeking freedom by moving beyond the domestic sphere, there is an equally interesting movement by the domestic man into the private space through his performance of femininity. This book defines the domesticated bachelor, examines the effects of the blurring of boundaries between the public and private spheres, and traces the evolution of the public discourse on masculinity in novels such as Bronte's Shirley, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This bachelor, along with his female counterpart, the New Woman, opens up for discussion new definitions of Victorian masculinity and gender boundaries and blurs the rigid distinction between the gendered spaces thought to be in place during the Victorian period.

Author : Jenni Calder
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : STANFORD:36105005299420

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Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction by Jenni Calder Pdf