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About this book
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 BrontĆ«'s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins's ArmadaleĀ¬ (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.
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Yes, you can access Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction by Noa Reich in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Speculating on Inheritance in Victorian Fiction
- Chapter One: āThat Popular Character . . . Call[ed] Anotherā: Relational Speculation in Our Mutual Friend
- Chapter Two: āHouseless-nessā and the āDead Pledgeā in Wuthering Heights
- Chapter Three: Seeing āNo Guiltless Mindsā: Inheritance and Liability in Collinsās Armadale
- Chapter Four: āLike the Inheritance of a Fortuneā: āSpeckilationā and Mortmain in Middlemarch
- Conclusion: Will-dangling and Sphex Wasps: Toward an Afterlife of Victorian Inheritance
- Bibliography
- About the Author