Troubled legacies: narrative and inheritance

"Last wills and testaments create tensions between those who inherit and those who imagine that they should inherit. As Victorian, modern, and contemporary novels amply demonstrate, seldom is more energy expended than at the reading of a will. Whether inheritances bring disappointment or jubilation, they create a pattern for the telling of stories, stories that involve the transmission of legacies - cultural, political, and monetary - from one generation to the next. Troubled Legacies examines these narratives of inheritance in British and Irish fiction from 1800 to the present. The essays in this collection set out to juxtapose legal and novelistic discourse. This reading of literature against law produces intriguing and often provocative assertions about the specific relationship between novels and inheritance. As the contributors argue, novels reinforce property law, an argument bolstered by the examples of women, workers, Jews, and Irishmen dispossessed of their rights and unable to claim their cultural inheritances. Troubled Legacies thoroughly examines the connection between narrative and claims to legal entitlement, a topic that has not, to date, been comprehensively broached in literary studies."--Pub. desc.

Introduction: inheritance and disinheritance in the novel / Allan Hepburn -- Owenson's 'Sacred union': domesticating Ireland, disavowing Catholicism in The wild Irish girl / Patrick R. O'Malley -- The nation's wife: England's vicarious enjoyment in Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels / Sara L. Mauer -- Ghostly dispossessions: the Gothic properties of Uncle Silas / Ann Gaylin -- The Englishness of a gentleman: illegitimacy and race in Daniel Deronda / Natalie Rose -- A battle of wills: solving The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde / Carol Margaret Davison -- E.M. Forster's The longest journey and the legacy of sentiment / Jay Dickson -- Heredity and disinheritance in Joyce's Portrait / Bradley D. Clissold -- Elizabeth Bowen and the maternal sublime / Maria DiBattista -- Good graces: inheritance and social climbing in Brideshead revisited / Allan Hepburn -- Maternal property and female voice in Banville's fiction / Jason S. Polley.