Engendering legitimacy : law, property, and early eighteenth-century fiction
"Engendering Legitimacy is a study of the intersecting of law, land, property, and gender in the prose fiction of Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Heywood, 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. Susan Glover contends that questions of political and legal legitimacy raised by the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 were transposed to the domestic and literary spheres of the early 1700s. Engendering Legitimacy examines the ways by which experimentation in prose fiction begins to re-vision the period's enmeshing of law, land, property, and political power, as the four writers imagine new grounds for authorial and political legitimacy."--Jacket
Criticism, interpretation, etc
231 pages ; 24 cm.
9780838756041, 0838756042
62133679
Conceiving the civil subject : property, power, and prose
Who shall inherit the earth? : Jonathan Swift and the jure paterno
Laying claim to title : Mary Davys and authorial dispossession
The incomplete tradesman : Daniel Defoe and the lay of the land
Heirs of the flesh : Eliza Haywood and the body of law