Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin

by Diane Warren (Editor), Laura Peters (Editor)

Overview

Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the culture and mores of the long nineteenth century, especially those relating to family and kinship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474464369
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr Diane Warren is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University of Portsmouth. She is the author of Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions, (Ashgate, 2008).

Professor Laura Peters is based at University of Roehampton. She is a well-published author including Dickens and Race (MUP, 2013) and Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (MUP, 2000).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

Introduction, Laura Peters

1. The Legal Guardian and Ward: Discovering the Orphan’s "Best Interests" in Mansfield Park and Mrs. Fitzherbert’s Notorious Adoption Case, Cheryl L. Nixon

2. Orphanhoods and Bereavements in the Life and Verse of Charlotte Smith Richardson (1775-1825), Kevin Binfield

3. ‘Like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming’: The Literary Orphan and the Victorian Novel, Tamara Wagner

4. Adoptive Reading, Kelly Hager

5. The Orphaned Waif in Victorian Narratives of Rescue and Redemption, Harriet Salisbury

6. Bodily Filth and Disorientation: Navigating Orphan Transformations in the Works of Dr Thomas Barnardo and Charles Dickens, Joey Kingsley

7. The Limits of the Human? Exhibiting Colonial Orphans in Victorian Culture, Laura Peters

8. Getting the Father Back: The Orphan’s Oath in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name and R. D. Blackmore’s Erema, Peter Merchant

9. Girlhood and Space in Nineteenth-Century Orphan Literature, Jane Suzanne Carroll

10. ‘The Accumulated and the Single’: Modernity, Inheritance and Orphan Identity, Diane Warren

11. Something worse than the past in not being yet over: Elizabeth Bowen’s Orphans, Exile and the Predicaments of Modernity, Ann Rea

12. Orphans, Money, and Marriage in Sensation Novels by Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman, Claudia Nelson

Coda, Diane Warren

What People are Saying About This

Talia Schaffer

Rereading Orphanhood provides a fascinating, fresh look at the way the orphan figure challenges conventional ideas of culture, family, development, law, inheritance, community, class, gender, and narrative. This collection is theoretically astute and usefully varied, and will reward anyone interested in family dynamics in the literature of the nineteenth century.