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Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the culture and mores of the long nineteenth century, especially those relating to family and kinship.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Introduction, Laura Peters
1. The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan's "Best Interests" in Mansfield Park and Mrs. Fitzherbert's Notorious Adoption Case, Cheryl L. Nixon
2. Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775-1825), Kevin Binfield
3. 'Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming': The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel, Tamara Wagner
4. Adoptive Reading, Kelly Hager
5. The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption, Harriet Salisbury
6. Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens, Joey Kingsley
7. The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture, Laura Peters
8. Getting the Father Back: The Orphan's Oath in Florence Marryat's Her Father's Name and R. D. Blackmore's Erema, Peter Merchant
9. Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature, Jane Suzanne Carroll
10. 'The Accumulated and the Single': Modernity, Inheritance and Orphan Identity, Diane Warren
11. Something worse than the past in not being yet over: Elizabeth Bowen's Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity, Ann Rea
12. Orphans, Money, and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman, Claudia Nelson
Coda, Diane Warren
About the author
Dr Diane Warren is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University of Portsmouth. She is the author of Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions, (Ashgate, 2008). Professor Laura Peters is based at University of Roehampton. She is a well-published author including Dickens and Race (MUP, 2013) and Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (MUP, 2000).
Summary
Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the culture and mores of the long nineteenth century, especially those relating to family and kinship.
