[John P. Zomchick] Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction : The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)(pdf){Zzzzz}[BЯ]

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.

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Review
'Through fresh and insightful readings of canonical texts, Dolin presents a sharp understanding of the limits of the law and of fiction's transcendent ability to say the unsayable.' The Australian - Higher Education --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book 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.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (8 Oct. 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0521044286
ISBN-13: 978-0521044288