Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925

Cathrine O. Frank (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

258 Seiten

2016
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-138-26055-9 (ISBN)

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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 BrontÃ«, 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.

Cathrine Frank is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New England, USA.

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.

Erscheinungsdatum	08.01.2017
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	480 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Journalistik
ISBN-10	1-138-26055-X / 113826055X
ISBN-13	978-1-138-26055-9 / 9781138260559
Zustand	Neuware