FAMILY AND THE LAW IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION by John P. Zomchick ( 9780511553578 )

Item Details

Title:

FAMILY AND THE LAW IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE IN THE PRIVATE SPHERE

By:

Format:

Electronic book text

List price:	£85.00
We currently do not stock this item, please contact the publisher directly for further information.

ISBN 10:

0511553579

ISBN 13:

9780511553578

Publisher:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

10 February, 2010

Series:

Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought 15

Description:

This book draws upon social, political and legal history to show that law and family play a central role in shaping the fictional world of six eighteenth-century English novels.

Synopsis:

Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers challenging interpretations of the public and private faces of individualism in the eighteenth-century English novel. John P. Zomchick begins by surveying the social, historical and ideological functions of law and the family in England's developing market economy. He goes on to examine in detail their part in the fortunes and misfortunes of the protagonists in Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Clarissa, Smollett's Roderick Random, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and Godwin's Caleb Williams. Zomchick reveals in these novels an attempt to produce a 'juridical subject': a representation of the individual identified with the principles and aims of the law, and motivated by an inherent need for affection and community fulfilled by the family. Their ambivalence towards that formulation indicates a nostalgia for less competitive social relations, and an emergent liberal critique of the law's operation in the service of society's elites.

Publication:

Imprint:

Cambridge University Press (Virtual Publishing)

Returns:

Non-returnable

Some other items by this author:

FAMILY AND THE LAW IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION (HB)

FAMILY AND THE LAW IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION (PB)

THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE PICKLE (HB)