Disputed Titles

Ireland, Scotland, and the Novel of Inheritance, 17981832

By (author) Natasha Tessone

Publication date:

30 October 2015

Length of book:

254 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611487091

Disputed Titles: Ireland, Scotland, and the Novel of Inheritance, 1798-1832 argues for the centrality of inheritance—often impeded, disrupted inheritance—to the novel’s rise to preeminence in Britain during the Romantic period. Novels by Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, and John Galt are densely populated by orphans, changelings, and lost and kidnapped heirs, and privilege a romance plot of dispossession that undermines the illusion of continuity implicit in the very concept of legacy. Through narratives of illegitimate ownership and other similar genealogical aberrations, authors from Britain’s “peripheries” interrogate their equivocal places in the uneasy compound of “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” Moving between the local and global manifestations of inheritance, their novels imagine history as contested property in order to explore vital issues of historic transition and political legitimacy, issues of immense consequence in the revolutionary climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Inheriting the Novel
1. “[M]ementi of ancient national splendour”: Sydney Owenson’s Ireland
2. Prophesying the Past: Guy Mannering and Scott’s Grid of Inheritance
3. “Arresting fleeting property”: Inheritance and the (Il)legitimacy of Historical Discourse in Scott’s The Antiquary
4. Legacy of Blunder: Maria Edgeworth’s Ireland
5. Fielding Fielding: Irish Tom Jones and a Plea for Passion in Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond
6. A “fraud against aature”: John Galt’s The Entail
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Natasha Tessone offers an important intervention into current critical understandings of the novel’s reliance on and reimagining of structures of property and inheritance. In this thought-provoking study, she emphasizes the national dimension of the inheritance plot, examining novels by Irish and Scottish authors that feature dispossession, broken families, and restrictive entails.... A real strength of Disputed Titles is its compelling close readings of the novels under consideration.... Tessone seamlessly integrates complex theory into her arguments.... In this strikingly original book, Tessone encourages us to see the rise of the novel anew by moving novels from the Irish and Scottish “peripheries” of Britain to the centre of that rise.