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Literary Criticism English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Troubled Legacies

Narrative and Inheritance

by (author) Allan Hepburn

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 2007
Category
English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802091109
    Publish Date
    Oct 2007
    List Price
    $76.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442685079
    Publish Date
    Dec 2007
    List Price
    $77.00

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Description

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.

About the author

Allan Hepburn is the James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University.

Allan Hepburn's profile page