Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction
Regular price
€92.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Noa Reich
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Noa Reich
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
Law and literature
Literary studies
Literature and economics
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Study of the novel
Victorian studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781666938364
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 159 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 27 Aug 2024
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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 Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale¬ (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.
Noa Reich is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Lethbridge.
