The afterlife of property : domestic security and the Victorian novel / Jeff Nunokawa.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nunokawa, Jeff, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Domestic fiction, English--History and criticism.

Domestic fiction, English.

Domestic relations in literature.

Homosexuality in literature.

Property in literature.

Marriage in literature.

Women in literature.

Sex in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (161 pages)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1994.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel. If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergences of fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the marketplace can be contained and expunged, clearing the way for secure possession. The Afterlife of Property addresses literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.

Contents:

CHAPTER ONE. Introduction

CHAPTER TWO. Domestic Securities: Little Dorrit and the Fictions of Property

CHAPTER THREE. For Your Eyes Only: Private Property and the Oriental Body in Dombey and Son

CHAPTER FOUR. Daniel Deronda and the Afterlife of Ownership

CHAPTER FIVE. The Miser's Two Bodies: Sexual Perversity and the Flight from Capital in Silas Marner

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-149) and index.

ISBN:

9786612767180

9781400805839

140080583X

9781400805822

1400805821

9781400824632

140082463X

9781282767188

1282767186

9781400812844

1400812844

OCLC:

705526969