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 Haywood, 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. Well researched and compellingly argued, 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.

About the author

Susan Paterson Glover is assistant professor of English at Laurentian University.

Product details

• Authors: Susan Glover, Susan Paterson Glover
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2020
• EAN: 9781611482225
• ISBN: 978-1-61148-222-5
• No. of pages: 231
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 234 mm x 20 mm
• Weight: 522 g
• Series: Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture; Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth; Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture; Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies