Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-century Fiction

Forside
Bucknell University Press, 2006 - 231 sider
Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction is a study of the intersecting of law, land, property, and gender in the prose fiction of Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Jonathan Swift. The law of property in early modern England established relations for men and women that artificially constructed, altered, and ended their connections with the material world, and the land they lived upon. The cultural role of land and law in a changing economy embracing new forms of property became a founding preoccupation around which grew the imaginative prose fiction that would develop into the English novel. Glover contends that questions of political and legal legitimacy raised by England's Revolution of 1688-89 were transposed to the domestic and literary spheres of the early 1700s.

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Innhold

Acknowledgments
9
List of Abbreviations
11
Introduction
13
Conceiving the Civil Subject Property Power and Prose
19
Who Shall Inherit the Earth? Jonathan Swift and the Jure Paterno
43
Laying Claim to Title Mary Davys and Authorial Dispossession
74
The Incomplete Tradesman Daniel Defoe and the Lay of the Land
101
Heirs of the Flesh Eliza Haywood and the Body of Law
133
Conclusion
157
Notes
162
Bibliography
198
Index
227
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Side 19 - ... that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
Side 19 - Of mystic, dark, discordant lore ; And points with tott'ring hand the ways That lead me to the thorny maze. There, in a winding, close retreat, Is Justice doom'd to fix her seat; There...
Side 25 - Princess during their lives, and the life of the survivor of them: and that the sole and full exercise of the regal power be only in, and executed by, the said Prince of Orange...
Side 19 - ... from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so before him ; or why the occupier of a particular field or of a jewel, when lying on his death-bed, and no longer able to maintain possession...
Side 192 - Fieri facias unto the Sheriff for to levy the Debt of the Lands and Goods; (2) or that the Sheriff shall deliver to him all the Chattels of the Debtor (saving only his Oxen and Beasts of his Plough) and the one half of his Land, until the Debt be levied upon a reasonable Price or Extent.
Side 113 - I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure, though mixed with my other afflicting thoughts, to think that this was all my own ; that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession...
Side 117 - Whose gend'ring offspring quickly learn'd to bow, And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough ; From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With neither name nor nation, speech or fame, In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran...
Side 20 - The united boast of many an age ; Where mix'd, yet uniform, appears The wisdom of a thousand years. In that pure spring the bottom view, Clear, deep, and regularly true ; And other doctrines thence imbibe Than lurk within the sordid scribe ; Observe how parts with parts unite In one harmonious rule...

Om forfatteren (2006)

Susan Paterson Glover is Assistant Professor of English at Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario.

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