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The Dispossessed State

Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Sara L. Maurer

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Do indigenous peoples have an unassailable right to the land they have worked and lived on, or are those rights conferred and protected only when a powerful political authority exists? In the tradition of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who vigorously debated the thorny concept of property rights, Sara L. Maurer here looks at the question as it applied to British ideas about Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century.

This book connects the Victorian novel’s preoccupation with the landed estate to nineteenth-century debates about property, specifically as it played out in the English occupation...

Do indigenous peoples have an unassailable right to the land they have worked and lived on, or are those rights conferred and protected only when a powerful political authority exists? In the tradition of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who vigorously debated the thorny concept of property rights, Sara L. Maurer here looks at the question as it applied to British ideas about Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century.

This book connects the Victorian novel’s preoccupation with the landed estate to nineteenth-century debates about property, specifically as it played out in the English occupation of Ireland. Victorian writers were interested in the question of whether the Irish had rights to their land that could neither be bestowed nor taken away by England. In analyzing how these ideas were represented through a century of British and Irish fiction, journalism, and political theory, Maurer recovers the broad influence of Irish culture on the rest of the British Isles.

By focusing on the ownership of land, The Dispossessed State challenges current scholarly tendencies to talk about Victorian property solely as a commodity. Maurer brings together canonical British novelists—Maria Edgeworth, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith—with the writings of major British political theorists—John Stuart Mill, Henry Sumner Maine, and William Gladstone—to illustrate Ireland’s central role in the literary imagination of Britain in the nineteenth century.

The book addresses three key questions in Victorian studies—property, the state, and national identity—and will interest scholars of the period as well as those in Irish studies, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

Reviews

Reviews

Maurer's innovative and considerable insights into nineteenth-century property issues will undoubtedly prove a valuable resource for those exploring colonial and postcolonial issues in literature. Meticulously researched, Maurer offers a scholarly and occasionally ironic voice to this growing field of study.

The work Sara L. Maurer offers here operates in a broader critical frame and opens a view onto a different critical practice.

Maurer makes an original and compelling contribution to the relatively sparse body of scholarship that aims to bring English and Irish studies into a productive conversation.

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Book Details

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth's Irish Fiction and the Illegitimacy of National Own ership
2. The Forbearance of the State: John Stuart Mill and the Promise of Irish

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth's Irish Fiction and the Illegitimacy of National Own ership
2. The Forbearance of the State: John Stuart Mill and the Promise of Irish Property
3. Native Property: Young Ireland and the Irish Land Acts in the Victorian Proprietary Landscape
4. The Wife of State: Ireland and En gland's Vicarious Enjoyment in Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels
5. At Home in the Public Domain: George Moore's Drama in Muslin, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, and the Intellectual Property of Union
Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Author Bio
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Sara L. Maurer

Sara L. Maurer is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.