Eighteenth-century fiction and the law of property / Wolfram Schmidgen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schmidgen, Wolfram, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Law and literature--History--18th century.

Law and literature.

Dwellings in literature.

Landscapes in literature.

Property in literature.

Law in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 266 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Eighteenth-Century Fiction & the Law of Property

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Wolfram Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyse the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction. His study argues that such descriptions are important to the British imagination of community. By making visible what it means to own something, they illuminate how competing concepts of property define the boundaries of the individual, of social community, and of political systems. In this way, Schmidgen recovers description as a major feature of eighteenth-century prose, and he makes his case across a wide range of authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Ann Radcliffe. The book's most incisive theoretical contribution lies in its careful insistence on the unity of the human and the material: in Schmidgen's argument, persons and things are inescapably entangled. This approach produces fresh insights into the relationship between law, literature, and economics.

Contents:

Communal form and the transitional culture of the eighteenth-century novel

Terra nullius, cannibalism, and the natural law of appropriation in Robinson Crusoe

Henry Fielding and the common law of plenitude

Commodity fetishism in heterogeneous spaces

Ann Radcliffe and the political economy of Gothic space

Scottish law and Waverley's museum of property.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 246-261) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-13475-7

1-280-15975-8

0-511-12087-7

0-511-04267-1

0-511-14830-5

0-511-33027-8

0-511-48448-8

0-511-04590-5

OCLC:

475917477