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"Inheritance and succession in literature."
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Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925
Focusing on the last will and testament as a legal, literary, and cultural document, Cathrine O. Frank examines fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras alongside actual wills, legal manuals relating to their creation, case law regarding their administration, and contemporary accounts of curious wills in periodicals. Her study begins with the Wills Act of 1837 and poses two basic questions: What picture of Victorian culture and personal subjectivity emerges from competing legal and literary narratives about the will, and how does the shift from realist to modernist representations of the will accentuate a growing divergence between law and literature? Frank’s examination of works by Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E.M. Forster reveals the shared rhetorical and cultural significance of the will in law and literature while also highlighting the competition between these discourses to structure a social order that emphasized self-determinism yet viewed individuals in relationship to the broader community. Her study contributes to our knowledge of the cultural significance of Victorian wills and creates intellectual bridges between the Victorian and Edwardian periods that will interest scholars from a variety of disciplines who are concerned with the laws, literature, and history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Contents: Part I Writing the Will: Introduction: novel bequests; Writing the will: Victorian testators and legal culture; Writing the novel: Victorian testators and literary culture. Part II Proving the Will: Victorian daughters and the burden of inheritance; Edwardian sons and the burden of inheritance redux. Part III Contesting the Will: Broken trusts: Cy Près, fiction and the limits of intention; Fictions of justice: testamentary intention and the illegitimate heir; Conclusion; Works cited; Index.
Cathrine Frank is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New England, USA.
eBook
The dynamics of inheritance on the Shakespearean stage
\"Early modern England's system of patrilineal inheritance, in which the eldest son inherited his father's estate and title, was one of the most significant forces affecting social order in the period. Demonstrating that early modern theatre played a unique and vital role in shaping how inheritance was understood, Michelle M. Dowd explores some of the common contingencies that troubled this system: marriage and remarriage, misbehaving male heirs, and families with only daughters. Shakespearean drama helped question and reimagine inheritance practices, making room for new formulations of gendered authority, family structure, and wealth transfer. Through close readings of canonical and non-canonical plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, and others, Dowd pays particular attention to the significance of space in early modern inheritance and the historical relationship between dramatic form and the patrilineal economy. Her book will interest researchers and students of early modern drama, Shakespeare, gender studies, and socio-economic history\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633
Hopkins argues the succession to the throne was a burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well into the 1630s, and drama, with its disguised identities and oblique relationship to reality, was a safe way to air it. Hopkins analyzes some of the ways in which plays-from Marlowe's and Shakespeare's to Webster's and Ford's-reflect, negotiate and dream the issue of the succession.
eBook
Disputed titles
Disputed Titles: Ireland, Scotland, and the Novel of Inheritance, 1798-1832 argues for the centrality of inheritance--often impeded, disrupted inheritance--to the novel's rise to preeminence in Britain during the Romantic period.
eBook
Troubled Legacies
Last wills and testaments create tensions between those who inherit and those who imagine that they should inherit. As Victorian, modern, and contemporary novels amply demonstrate, seldom is more energy expended than at the reading of a will. Whether inheritances bring disappointment or jubilation, they create a pattern for the telling of stories, stories that involve the transmission of legacies – cultural, political, and monetary – from one generation to the next. Troubled Legacies examines these narratives of inheritance in British and Irish fiction from 1800 to the present.
The essays in this collection set out to juxtapose legal and novelistic discourse. This reading of literature against law produces intriguing and often provocative assertions about the specific relationship between novels and inheritance. As the contributors argue, novels reinforce property law, an argument bolstered by the examples of women, workers, Jews, and Irishmen dispossessed of their rights and unable to claim their cultural inheritances. Troubled Legacies thoroughly examines the connection between narrative and claims to legal entitlement, a topic that has not, to date, been comprehensively broached in literary studies.
eBook
Thy Truth Then Be Thy Dowry
This collection of essays provides new insights into the theme of inheritance in American womens writing, ranging from Emily Dickinsons appropriation of Shakespeares legacy to Meredith Sue Williss exploration of the tension between material inheritance and spiritual heritage in the Appalachian context. Using diverse critical and theoretical models, the twelve contributors examine womens problematic relationship to inheritance in a variety of historical, geographical, and personal context.
eBook
Natural Authority in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit and the Copyright Act of 1842
This essay argues that Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) challenges the legal justifications underpinning Sergeant Talfourd's 1842 Copyright Extension Act. The novel does so by problematizing the logic of natural right, a logic adopted by proponents of copyright to defend further copyright extensions. Martin Chuzzlewit's narrator attacks natural right through his representations of inheritance, repeatedly demonstrating how heirs subvert and appropriate testators' natural rights, and thus proving natural right to be a subjective, and even fictional, construct that can be adopted in potentially unjust ways. By destabilizing the logic of natural right, the narrator exposes the ways in which promoters of copyright employed inheritance as a metaphorical tool that allowed them to rationalize copyright extensions, and, in so doing, he threatens the institutions of inheritance, copyright, and authorship. Such a radical critique of intellectual property places Martin Chuzzlewit's narrative voice in conflict with Dickens's political persona and Dickens's avowed political aims, ultimately harming Dickens's, and other authors', own interests. In accounting for the paradoxical logic of natural right, however, Martin Chuzzlewit's narrator offers the most nuanced account of the problems of intellectual property that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
Journal Article