| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,140,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥1,040,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Since nineteenth-century British novels are primarily concerned with how a family can continue, it is inevitably dominated by the two main plots : marriage and inheritance. These plots are inextricably and ingeniously intertwined. It is obviously preferable for a family to maintain and bequeath the property among the family members, whereas marriage by definition introduces the biological 'other' from outside the family ; spouses are not related to each other by blood unless they are cousins : by way of marriage, the 'other' is assimilated into the family. At the same time, the legal system of primogeniture which solely favours an eldest son, has an exclusive function, expelling younger sons and daughters from the family. Thus, family formations require the 'familialisation' and exclusion.
In this project, focusing on cousins who stand within what I have called the 'grey zone'-(overlapping) boundaries between (constructed) consanguinity and affinity, between kin-ness and otherness, I tried to examine how they decisively affect family formations in some major 19th century British Novels. In the process, I made researches in some libraries, especially in the British Library in London to collect primary sources concerning Marriage Laws and articles on inheritance in 19-century England, marriage with a deceased sister's wife.
This research, together with my previous research The Representation of cousins in Nineteenth-century British Novels, ' resulted in D. Phil thesis, presented to University of Sussex in 2007.
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