Disputed Titles

Ireland, Scotland, and the Novel of Inheritance, 1798-1832

Natasha Tessone

2015
262 pages
ISBN 9781611487091
Transits

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.

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Reviews

"Tessone understands these novels, experimenting with narrative time, as contesting entailment not only as an attempt to fix property across time but as a metaphor for the passing on of literary tradition. "
- Jeffrey N. Cox, SEL, 56, 4 (Autumn 2016)

"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. This repositioning reveals that romance novels about family inheritance are, at heart, about national heritage. Disputed Titles ensures that we recognize the Irish and Scottish romances as crucial contributors to the novel - and its multiple concerns of family, politics, economics, and identity - that we have inherited."
- Cheryl L. Nixon, University of Massachusetts Boston; Eighteenth-Century Fiction (30.1), Fall 2017

"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 .... 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."
- Cheryl L. Nixon, University of Massachusetts Boston; Eighteenth-Century Fiction (30.1), Fall 2017

About the author:

Natasha Tessone is associate professor in the English Department at Oberlin College, where she teaches courses on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. Her articles and reviews have appeared in such journal as ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Studies in the Novel, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Éire-Ireland.

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eBook: 9781611487107