Title: Impotent fathers
First published: 1998
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, Inheritance and succession in literature, Kinship in literature, Demographic transition, Literature and society, History and criticism, Family in literature, English fiction, Property in literature, Power (Social sciences) in literature, Patriarchy in literature, Families in literature, English fiction, history and criticism, 18th century, Modern Literature, English, Demography
Places: England
Time periods: 18th century
LC classification: PR858.P34 M37 1998