Property and possession: Law, land, and early eighteenth-century English fiction, 1700--1735.

摘要

This thesis is a study of the concepts of property and possession in early eighteenth-century English fiction, and how these constructs, circumscribing in a quite literal way the boundaries of economic status, gender, and desire, came to bear on the literary experimentation from which emerged the modern novel. It begins with the Revolution of 1688--89, and the subsequent entangling of questions about landed property as the locus of political power, about textual and bodily production, and about the role of England's common law in defining the gendered subject. The remainder of the study pursues this intersection of land, law, and property in the emerging prose fiction of Jonathan Swift, Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, and Eliza Haywood.; The second chapter begins this process by tracing the evolving inscriptions of legitimacy and political power in the prose fiction of Jonathan Swift, from his early days in Ireland, Moor Park, and London to the later period of Gulliver's Travels and The Drapier's Letters. The third chapter explores the work of his fellow Irish writer, Mary Davys, whose novels contribute a surprisingly sophisticated interrogation of conventions of property and power, and help to initiate a challenge to the normative bounds of the common law. The fourth chapter addresses the conflicting claims of land and commerce in the writing of Daniel Defoe, exploring the dissonance between his journalistic prose and his fiction, and reassessing views of his advocacy of the new economic order. The fifth chapter focusses on the early novels of Eliza Haywood, the 'amatory fiction' of the 1720s, with their explicit questioning of the role of the female body in the transmission of property, and the elusive agency of possession and possessing.; The conclusion looks ahead to the years immediately following the terminus of this study, to see the early-articulated anxieties about property and possession re-appear as a central preoccupation of the mature novel of the eighteenth century.