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.