Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Family feeling
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The imprisoning houses of Mr B and Lovelace are metamorphosed into a real medieval castle; tyrannical parents have become feudal princes; family secrets have become real skeletons in the cupboard; arguments in letters materialize into actual duels; contemporary England and the uncivilized barbarities of the Augustan metropolis have become the threatening precincts and tenebral cavities of a late medieval Italian fortress; a Providential universe has been translated into a world of dynastic feuding and historical determination.
Clive Probyn, English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century 1700–1789, p. 171.If the appearance of Gothic suggests anything, it is some historical factor in this literary development, something which made the family a cultural pressure point.
Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, pp. 90–1.The family, in its contemporary form, must not be understood as a social, economic, and political structure of alliance that excludes or at least restrains sexuality … On the contrary, its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with permanent support … [S]ince the eighteenth century the family has become the obligatory locus of affects, feelings, love; that sexuality has its privileged point of development in the family; that for this reason sexuality is “incestuous” from the start.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, pp. 108–9.- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Novel RelationsThe Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818, pp. 372 - 408Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004