Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
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Raffaella Antinucci
Raffaella Antinucci is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Naples “Parthenope” (Italy). Her main areas of research include Victorian culture and fiction, corpus stylistics, and comparative literatures, with a special focus on the Anglo-Italian relations in the years of the Risorgimento. She is the author of a monograph on the literary representations of the Victorian gentleman (2009), a study on Austen’s
Emma (2017), and of several articles on Victorian and modernist writers, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Anthony Trollope, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce. She is a member of CUSVE, the Italian Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies.
Abstract
Despite the little critical attention it has received, Lady Anna is exemplary in Trollope’s output as a novel in which contemporary ideas of Englishness, gentlemanliness and the law are not only questioned, but also complicated and conflated in various ways. Whereas the majority of scholars have focused their analyses on the legal intricacies of the dispute involving Lady Anna and occasionally on the reflection on true gentlemanliness, which indeed is the central concern of the novel (most often simply to ascertain whether the son of a tailor could be a gentleman or not), the present contribution intends to re-assess the paradigms of masculinities embodied by the male protagonists of Trollope’s novel, and to verify to what extent the gentlemanly status can also be granted to the law’s representatives, in particular to the Solicitor-General Sir William Patterson in both his private and public roles. The various and opposite criteria adopted by the different characters to judge and define a gentleman mirror the epistemological changes that had been re-shaping the debate on its figure, thus disclosing a social texture in which old and new notions of gentlemanliness co-existed.
About the author
Raffaella Antinucci is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Naples “Parthenope” (Italy). Her main areas of research include Victorian culture and fiction, corpus stylistics, and comparative literatures, with a special focus on the Anglo-Italian relations in the years of the Risorgimento. She is the author of a monograph on the literary representations of the Victorian gentleman (2009), a study on Austen’s Emma (2017), and of several articles on Victorian and modernist writers, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Anthony Trollope, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce. She is a member of CUSVE, the Italian Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus: Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
- Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
- Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
- The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
- Late-Victorian Experiences with Italian Legislation: Stories of Sex, Madness and Social Commitment
- “Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”
- Research
- Robotics and Work: Between Fiction and Reality
- Praising the World “by Geometrical Terms”: Legal Metrics, Science and Indicators in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa
- The Voice of the People in Homer
- Elizabeth the Rhetorician. An Analysis of the Greatest Speeches by the Virgin Queen
- Book Review
- Pier Giuseppe Monateri: Dominus Mundi. Political Sublime and the World Order
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus: Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
- Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
- Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
- The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
- Late-Victorian Experiences with Italian Legislation: Stories of Sex, Madness and Social Commitment
- “Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”
- Research
- Robotics and Work: Between Fiction and Reality
- Praising the World “by Geometrical Terms”: Legal Metrics, Science and Indicators in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa
- The Voice of the People in Homer
- Elizabeth the Rhetorician. An Analysis of the Greatest Speeches by the Virgin Queen
- Book Review
- Pier Giuseppe Monateri: Dominus Mundi. Political Sublime and the World Order
