Impotent fathers
Subtitle: patriarchy and demographic crisis in the eighteenth-century novel
By: Brian McCrea.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Newark; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: English fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Patriarchy in literature; Literature and society -- England -- History -- 18th century; Demographic transition -- England -- History -- 18th century; Inheritance and succession in literature; Power (Social sciences) in literature; Property in literature; Kinship in literature; Family in literature
Description: Understanding the novel as both the document and the agent of social change, Impotent Fathers studies how writers in eighteenth-century Britain at once recorded and helped to define a major demographic crisis suffered by the landed elite from 1650 to 1740. To questions about patriarchy, property, and gender in the early novel, it brings recent work on demographics by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population Studies (E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Schofield, Lloyd Bonfield, and others) and by Lawrence F. and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone. Impotent Fathers proposes that the early novel was an important means for readers and writers to work through anxieties about family, property, and succession created by failures in patrilinear succession.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-236) and index.