There is absolutely nothing improper about Hannah Foster, the vicar of Hartley's eldest daughter, nursing the badly wounded Viscount Blackthorn back to health, that's if the returned officer can be saved. At age twenty-seven, she is two years his senior, a confirmed spinster and far too sensible to develop feelings for her patient. Even if the unthinkable were to happen and William were to see past her plain exterior and recognize the passionate woman beneath, he is determined to break the curse that has plagued his family for generations by letting his bloodline die out. Lord Blackthorn has no interest in matrimony and even if he did, a man of his wealth and position would never be interested in a woman like Hannah, would he?

Most people understand property as something that is owned, a means of creating individual wealth. But in Commodity and Propriety, the first full-length history of the meaning of property, Gregory Alexander uncovers in American legal writing a competing vision of property that has existed alongside the traditional conception. Property, Alexander argues, has also been understood as proprietary, a mechanism for creating and maintaining a properly ordered society. This view of property has even operated in periods—such as the second half of the nineteenth century—when market forces seemed to dominate social and legal relationships. In demonstrating how the understanding of property as a private basis for the public good has competed with the better-known market-oriented conception, Alexander radically rewrites the history of property, with significant implications for current political debates and recent Supreme Court decisions.

In traditional China, upper-class literati were inevitably strongly influenced by Confucian doctrine and rarely touched upon such topics as love and women in their writings. It was not until the mid-Tang, a generation or two after the An Lushan rebellion, that literary circles began to engage in overt discussion of the issues of love and women, through the use of the newly emerging genres of zhiguai and chuanqi fiction. The debate was carried out with an unprecedented enthusiasm, since the topics were considered to be the key to understanding the crisis in Chinese civilization. This book examines the repertoire of chuanqi and zhiguai written during the Six Dynasties and Tang periods and analyzes the key themes, topics, and approaches found in these tales, which range from expressions of male fantasy, sympathy, fear, and anxiety, to philosophical debate on the place of the feminine in patriarchal Chinese society. Many of these stories reflect tensions between masculine and feminine aspects of civilization as seen, for example, in the conflict of male aspiration and female desire, as well as the ultimate longing for reconciliation of these divisions. These stories form a crucial chapter in the history of love in China and would provide much of the foundation for further explorations during the late imperial period, as seen in seminal works such as The Peony Pavilion and Dream of the Red Chamber.

In this book, Duncan Kelly excavates, from the history of modern political thought, a largely forgotten claim about liberty as a form of propriety. By rethinking the intellectual and historical foundations of modern accounts of freedom, he brings into focus how this major vision of liberty developed between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. In his framework, celebrated political writers, including John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green pursue the claim that freedom is best understood as a form of responsible agency or propriety, and they do so by reconciling key moral and philosophical claims with classical and contemporary political theory. Their approach broadly assumes that only those persons who appropriately regulate their conduct can be thought of as free and responsible. At the same time, however, they recognize that such internal forms of self-propriety must be judged within the wider context of social and political life. Kelly shows how the intellectual and practical demands of such a synthesis require these great writers to consider freedom as part of a broader set of arguments about the nature of personhood, the potentially irrational impact of the passions, and the obstinate problems of individual and political judgement. By exploring these relationships, The Propriety of Liberty not only revises the intellectual history of modern political thought, but also sheds light on contemporary debates about freedom and agency.

This book presents a new interpretation of the principle of utility in moral and political theory based on the writings of the classical utilitarians. The writings of Adam Smith, William Paley and Jeremy Bentham are also considered.

Almost on the centenary of his death, this book studies the novels of Wilkie Collins and attempts to appreciate his representation of Victorian mores. It pays particular attention to Collins' views on sexuality, both male and female, and the laws concerning the distribution of property.