Introduction: Writing Inheritance in European Literature

Abstract

This introduction presents the rationale behind this special issue about European literature’s engagement with modern inheritance practices. It introduces some of the fundamental conceptual, legal, and historical aspects of inheritance in Western modernity, and outlines how the articles in this issue address them. The articles deal with literary and historic materials from the seventeenth century to the present, and the introduction stresses both the historical changes and continuities in their treatments of inheritance.

Keywords:

• Inheritance
• modern literature
• inheritance taxation
• inheritance law
• legacies
• property
• patrimonial capitalism
• family
• testaments
• heirs

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of the contributions to this volume are reworked papers presented at the conference “Passing On: Property, Family and Death in Narratives of Inheritance” organized by David Hasberg Zirak-Schmidt, Julie Hastrup-Markussen, and Jakob Ladegaard with the assistance of Jonas Kirk Dejgaard, Mads Nansen Paulsen, and Karen Kam Wium Pedersen, and held November 13–15, 2019 at Aarhus University. We would like to thank all participants in the event for contributing to an engaging dialogue about inheritance that helped shape this special issue. We also gratefully acknowledge Independent Research Fund Denmark for funding the conference and our editorial work on this special issue through the research project “Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600–2015.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jens Beckert, Inherited Wealth, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 280.

2 Joseph Jenkins, “What Should Inheritance Law Be?,” Law & Literature 20, no. 2 (2008): 129–50; see esp. pp. 139–41

3 Gillian Douglas, Hilary Woodward, Alun Humphrey, Lisa Mills, and Gareth Morrell, “Enduring Love? Attitudes to Family and Inheritance Law in England and Wales,” Journal of Law and Society 38, no. 2 ( 2011): 245–71.

4 Anne Gotman, L’héritage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 71–3.

5 See Eileen Spring, Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

6 Hanna Kuusela, “Learning to Own: Cross-Generational Meanings of Wealth and Class-Making in Wealthy Finnish Families,” The Sociological Review 66, no. 6 (2018): 1161–76, esp. 1168–71; see also Michael Gilding, “Families and Fortunes: Accumulation, Management Succession and Inheritance in Wealthy Families,” Journal of Sociology 41, no. 1 (2005): 29–45.

7 Caroline Freund, Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging-Market Tycoons and Their Mega Firms (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2016), 126.

8 For more on the modern history of cultural heritage, see Stefan Willer, “Kulturelles Erbe: Tradieren und Konservieren,” in Erbe - Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur, ed. Stefan Willer, Sigrid Weigel, Bernhard Jussen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 160–201.

9 Quoted from Bernhard Judex, Thomas Bernhard: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2010), 28. Translation by Alexander Matschi.

10 Carolyn Folkman Curasi, Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnold, “How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth,” The Journal of consumer research 31, no. 3 (2004): 609–22.

11 Bodil Selmer, “How to Exchange with the Dead: The Significance of Heirlooms in Contemporary Danish Inheritance Practices,” in Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today, ed. O.-A. Rønning, H. M. Sigh, and H. Vogt (London: Routledge, 2017), 297–302.

12 Beckert, Inherited Wealth, 170.

13 For more on the rhetoric of recent estate tax opposition, see Michael J. Graetz & Ian Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 221–38.

14 Ibid., 201–8.

15 “Estate Tax,” https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/estate-tax (accessed January 20, 2021); Chye-Ching Huang and Chloe Cho, “Ten Facts You Should Know About the Federal Estate Tax,” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), October 30, 2017, https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/ten-facts-you-should-know-about-the-federal-estate-tax (accessed January 20, 2021).

16 ”Inheritance Tax,” https://www.gov.uk/inheritance-tax (accessed January 20, 2021).

17 Facundo Alvaredo, Bertrand Garbinti, and Thomas Piketty, “On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010,” Economica 84 (2017): 240.

18 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

19 Freund, Rich People Poor Countries, 38; Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver, “The Origins of the Superrich: The Billionaire Characteristics Database,” PIIE Working Papers 16, no. 1 (2016): 12, https://www.piie.com/publications/wp/wp16-1.pdf

20 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 418–21.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jakob Ladegaard

Jakob Ladegaard is an associate professor in comparative literature at Aarhus University. He mainly works on Early Modern English drama, using qualitative and computational methods. He is the director of a collective research project entitled “Unearned Wealth – A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600–2015,” supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. With Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, he has recently published “Selfish Bastards? A Corpus-Based Approach to Illegitimacy in Early Modern Drama,” Memoria di Shakespeare, no. 7 (“Stylometry”, ed. Hugh Craig), 2020. He has also recently co-edited Context in Literary and Cultural Studies with Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen (London: UCL Press, 2019).

Beth Cortese

Beth Cortese is a postdoctoral researcher on the Unearned Wealth project at Aarhus University where she researches women and inheritance in drama and prose from the long-eighteenth century. She was awarded her PhD on “Women’s Wit on Stage 1660–1720” from Lancaster University in 2018, and is working on a monograph focused on the same subject. Her most recent publications are “From Love of Money to Love for Love: Heiresses on the Long Eighteenth Century Stage”, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 32, no. 2 (2020) and “Eunuchs, Mutes and the Performance of Anxiety in Orientalist Plays” in Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Anne Greenfield (London: Routledge, 2019).