Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Nineteenth-Century English CultureStanford University Press, 2004 - 238 pages 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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Adam Bede affective alienation argues Arthur Aunt Norris avuncular avunculate becomes Bertram Bleak House body British brother capital capitalist Catherine Gallagher century chapter circulation colonial commercial commodity consumption cultural Daniel Deronda daugh daughter Dickens Donnithorne economic Eliot endogamy England exchange fact Fanny Fanny's father female feminist fiction George Eliot Gwendolyn Hall Farm heritage Hetty Hetty Sorrel Hetty's Hill's home trade household Humphry Repton Ibid identity ideology idiom improvement Jane Jewish kinship labor land letter Malthusian Mansfield Park Maria marriage metaphor middle-class Middlemarch moral Moreover mother narrative nephew niece nineteenth nineteenth-century nomic novel nuclear family paternalistic patriarchal pawn pawnbroker pawnshop penny post perpetually political economy Post Office postage postal reform Poyser production rhetoric Rowland Hill sentiment sexual Sir Thomas Sir Thomas's sisters social teleology tenant tion transformation Trollope's tropes Uncle John University Press usurer usurer's usury Victorian waste woman women working-class York