Project title
Legal Bodies: Women, Economies, and the Law in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Research question
What roles did women’s bodies and emotions play in court as they navigated the British legal system? How does narrative jurisprudence develop as a political strategy and critique for women writers?
Project description
This project argues that the female body–central to the legality of birthright and legitimacy–is presented as a form of extralegal evidence in eighteenth-century courts and British novels.
Jolene Zigarovich distinguishes this argument by uncovering court cases where female emotion, resemblance, and virtue become part of the proceedings and jurist decisions.
The project then identifies a shift in the latter half of the century, when women’s success within the legal system declines, and narrative jurisprudence responds by depicting women inheriting, bequeathing, and claiming birthright through their own private means.
Zigarovich’s main claim is that unlike the law, fiction more often allowed women possibilities for agency and private identity. Working with law and affect theory, chapters in this book examine how emotional and coercive aspects of female birthright and inheritance cases are reworked and reimagined by female novelists, suggesting that narrative becomes a more reliable space for women to be active legal and moral agents.
Selected publications
- Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.
https://www.pennpress.org/9781512823776/death-and-the-body-in-the-eighteenth-century-novel/ - “Surnames and Inheritance: Will-Plotting and Female Economic Power in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.”
Inheritance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Eds. Suzanne Lenon and Daniel Monk. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 97-114. - “Matriarchal Economies: Women Inheriting from Women in Eighteenth-Century Wills, Courts, and Fiction.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 52, (2023): 227-255.
More about myself
NIAS Fellowship September 2021 – June 2022
Necropolitics: Legislating the Dead Body and the Victorian Novel
Research Question
Why do dead bodies command forms of regulation? Why are certain nineteenth-century legal structures spectral and uncanny? How are economies of death unique to narrative?
Project Description
This project considers the posthumous life of characters uncannily bound by regulation. It interrogates the economic and political instrumentalization of death, and legal features that historically aimed to promote yet in many ways also inhibit reliability. I argue that while the Victorian novel upholds legal authority, it simultaneously critiques it, affording a strategy for advocacy against normative regulations through the symbol of the untraceable or dead. Drawing on the theory of power and death termed “necropolitics,” I investigate how contemporary legal issues are transformed into haunting aspects of Victorian narrative jurisprudence.
Selected Publications
- Zigarovich, Jolene. “Gothic and the History of Sexuality.” The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Vol. 1. Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century. Eds. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 382-405.
- Zigarovich, Jolene. “The Problem of Female Birthright in Chancery and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Law & Literature. 31:3 (2019): 487-508.
- Zigarovich, Jolene (Editor). TransGothic in Literature and Culture. Series: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. Routledge, 2017.