Title: Crises of realism
First published: 1997
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.
Subjects: History and criticism, Realism in literature, English fiction, Realisme dans la litterature, Realismus, Histoire et critique, Roman anglais, Roman, Litterature anglaise, English fiction, history and criticism, 19th century, English fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, Patriarchy in literature, Literature and society, History, Demographic transition, Inheritance and succession in literature, Power (Social sciences) in literature, Property in literature, Kinship in literature, Families in literature
Time periods: 20th century, 19th century
LC classification: PR868.R4 L58 1997