Avuncularism : capitalism, patriarchy, and nineteenth-century English culture
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Bibliographic Information
Avuncularism : capitalism, patriarchy, and nineteenth-century English culture
Stanford University Press, 2004
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Avuncularism : capitalism, patriarchy, and 19th-century English culture
Available at 8 libraries
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Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Avuncularism explores the fiction of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and many other writers in order to argue that the "nuclear" nineteenth-century family was, in fact, far more fractured and contradictory than twentieth-century critics have assumed. One important and long-forgotten point of such fracture is the popular nickname given to pawnbrokers in the Victorian era: My Uncle. This fundamental connection between pawnbrokers and uncles provides the touchstone of the author's larger argument: that representations of the "avunculate" (a term borrowed from anthropology) in nineteenth-century literature and culture mark a preoccupation with the increasingly theorized and embattled directives of a new political economy.
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