The Afterlife of Property:
Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel
Jeff Nunokawa

Paper | 2003 | $27.95 / £19.95
160 pp. | 6 x 9

e-Book | 2001 | $27.95 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-2463-2

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In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel.

If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergences of fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the marketplace can be contained and expunged, clearing the way for secure possession. The Afterlife of Property addresses literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.

Reviews:

"Jeff Nunokawa enters the familiar territory of Victorian fiction where capital and romance coexist and illuminates the subject in ways that are aften striking and valuable. . . . A provocative exploration."--Victorian Review

"Brilliant. . . . Nunokawa's book . . . will inspire anyone interested in the place of property in Victorian culture."--John Kucich, Victorian Studies

"The achievements of this elegant book are clear. . . . [It provides] finely nuanced and strikingly innovative readings of four canonical novels."--Catherine Gallagher, Nineteenth-Century Literature

"[An] illuminating reading . . . of social and domestic relations in the nineteenth century."--Natalie McKnight, Dickens Quarterly

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Ch. 1 Introduction p.3
Ch. 2 Domestic Securities: Little Dorrit and the Fictions of Property p.19
Ch. 3 For Your Eyes Only: Private Property and the Oriental Body in Dombey and Son p.40
Ch. 4 Daniel Deronda and the Afterlife of the Ownership p.77
Ch. 5 The Miser's Two Bodies: Sexual Perversity and the Flight from Capital in Silas Marner p.100
Afterword p.122
Notes p.125
Works Cited p.143
Index p.150

Another Princeton book by Jeff Nunokawa:

• Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire.

Subject Areas:

• British Literature
• Gender Studies

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File created: 10/18/2009

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