The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel

(Paperback)

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This study investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for its example four texts, Charles Dickens's "Little Dorrit" and "Dombey and Son", and George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda" and "Silas Marner", it studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, it relates how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel.

Reviews

"Jeff Nunokawa enters the familiar territory of Victorian fiction where capital and romance coexist and illuminates the subject in ways that are aften striking and valuable... A provocative exploration."--Victorian Review "Brilliant... Nunokawa's book ... will inspire anyone interested in the place of property in Victorian culture."--John Kucich, Victorian Studies "The achievements of this elegant book are clear... [It provides] finely nuanced and strikingly innovative readings of four canonical novels."--Catherine Gallagher, Nineteenth-Century Literature "[An] illuminating reading ... of social and domestic relations in the nineteenth century."--Natalie McKnight, Dickens Quarterly

Author Bio

Jeff Nunokawa is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of "Tame Passions of Wilde" (Princeton).