Synopses & Reviews
Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyse the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction.
Synopsis
Wolfram Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyse the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction. Schmidgen recovers description as a major category of eighteenth-century prose, examining a wide range of authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Ann Radcliffe.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Communal form and the transitional culture of the eighteenth-century novel; 2. Terra nullius, cannibalism, and the natural law of appropriation in Robinson Crusoe; 3. Henry Fielding's common law of plenitude; 4. Commodity fetishism in heterogeneous spaces; 5. Ann Radcliffe and the political economy of Gothic space; 6. Scottish law and Waverley's museum of property; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.