Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Davis, Alex (1973-....)
Titre(s) : Imagining inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare [Texte imprimé] / Alex Davis
Édition : First edition
Publication : Oxford (GB) ; New York : Oxford university press, 2020
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (297 p.) : ill. ; 24 cm
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references and index
Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice
of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire;
a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman
who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate
Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin bequeathed to mankind by
our first parents, Adam and Eve. This book explores how inheritance was imagined between
the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period
was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs',
in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting
to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence,
and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose,
and drama--in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's
Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant
of Venice; and in a host of other works--we encounter a range of texts that attests
to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth
and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between the late medieval and early modern periods,
Imagining Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue that an exploration
of the ways in which premodern inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep
structures of power that modernity wants to forget
Sujet(s) : Successions et héritages -- Dans la littérature
Littérature anglaise -- 1100-1500 (moyen anglais) -- Thèmes, motifs
Littérature anglaise -- 16e siècle -- Thèmes, motifs
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780198851424. - ISBN 0198851421 (rel.)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb46619238z
Notice n° :
FRBNF46619238
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
Table des matières : Introduction: Imagining premodern inheritance ; Fictions of the will ; Natural
philosophy ; World histories ; Epilogue.
