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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.
Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Deborah Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. As the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed in connection to women's culture and property law, new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction are revealed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel. If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergences of fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the marketplace can be contained and expunged, clearing the way for secure possession. The Afterlife of Property addresses literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.