Title Family and the law in eighteenth-century fiction : the public conscience in the private sphere / John P. Zomchick

Published Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, ©1993

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Description 1 online resource (xviii, 210 pages) Series Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought ; 15 Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought ; 15. Contents 1. Introduction -- 2. Roxana's contractual affiliations -- 3. Clarissa Harlowe: caught in the contract -- 4. Tame spirits, brave fellows, and the web of law: Robert Lovelace's legalistic conscience -- 5. Roderick Random: suited by the law -- 6. Shadows of the prison house or shade of the family tree: Amelia's public and private worlds -- 7. The embattled middle: longing for authority in The Vicar of Wakefield -- 8. Caleb Williams: negating the romance of the public conscience Summary Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers challenging new interpretations of the public and private faces of individualism in the eighteenth-century English novel. John P. Zomchick begins by surveying the social, historical and ideological functions of law and the family in England's developing market economy. He goes on to examine in detail their part in the fortunes and misfortunes of the protagonists in Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Clarissa, Smollett's Roderick Random, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and Godwin's Caleb Williams. Zomchick reveals in these novels an attempt to produce a 'juridical subject': a representation of the individual identified with the principles and aims of the law, and motivated by an inherent need for affection and community fulfilled by the family. Their ambivalence towards that formulation indicates a nostalgia for less competitive social relations, and an emergent liberal critique of the law's operation in the service of society's elites.--Publisher description Analysis English fiction Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-206) and index Notes Print version record Subject English fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism Law and literature -- History -- 18th century Social problems in literature. Individualism in literature. Families in literature. English fiction Families in literature Individualism in literature Law and literature Social problems in literature Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book LC no. 92015796

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