Fictions of Justice: Testamentary Intention and the (Il)legitimate Heir in Trollope's Ralph the Heir and Forster's Howards End

Frank, Cathrine O.

doi:10.2487/71j2-l057-m210-7750

elt

2004

DOI: 10.2487/71j2-l057-m210-7750

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Fictions of Justice: Testamentary Intention and the (Il)legitimate Heir in Trollope's Ralph the Heir and Forster's Howards End

Cathrine O. Frank¹

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2008

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Trial Separations: Divorce, Disestablishment, and Home Rule in Phineas Redux

Frank¹

2008

lit

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Phineas Redux (1874), the fourth of Anthony Trollope’s “political” novels, depicts several unions between parties who remain formally tied to one another although they have no affective bond. Two failing marriages are dissolved (one by death, another through revelation of bigamy), but actual divorce is never mooted. Debate over disestablishment of the Anglican Church opens the novel, but formal interest in the separation of church and state is supplanted by a murder trial and barely resurrected. And in the breach between these parties stands Phineas Finn, the novel’s Catholic, Irish hero. This paper argues that the novel’s early focus on unsuccessful marriages voices parallels albeit unspoken concerns about “Home” Rule and England’s increasingly tenuous union with Ireland. More broadly, it suggests that through Phineas’s trial initially political questions of church versus state authority governing the legitimacy of these unions are transformed into personal ones of conscience and feeling. This internalization of the political becomes an aspect of character formation that raises the questions of how law transforms national politics into personal conviction and how literature uses law to develop its characters.

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Trial Separations: Divorce, Disestablishment, and Home Rule in Phineas Redux

Frank¹

2008

lit

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Fictions of Justice: Testamentary Intention and the (Il)legitimate Heir in Trollope's Ralph the Heir and Forster's Howards End

Cited by 1 publication

References 16 publications

Trial Separations: Divorce, Disestablishment, and Home Rule in Phineas Redux

Trial Separations: Divorce, Disestablishment, and Home Rule in Phineas Redux

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