Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (review)

Abstract

"Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction" is a study of the intersecting of law, land, property, and gender in the prose fiction of Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Jonathan Swift. The law of property in early modern England established relations for men and women that artificially constructed, altered, and ended their connections with the material world, and the land they lived upon. The cultural role of land and law in a changing economy embracing new forms of property became a founding preoccupation around which grew the imaginative prose fiction that would develop into the English novel. Glover contends that questions of political and legal legitimacy raised by England's Revolution of 1688-89 were transposed to the domestic and literary spheres of the early 1700s. The book examines the ways by which experimentation in prose fiction begins to offer a re-vision of the period's enmeshing of law, land, property, and political power, as the four writers imagine new grounds for authorial and political legitimacy. Susan Paterson Glover is an Assistant Professor of English at Laurentian University.