ABSTRACT
Property is the legal right to own something, to exclude others from its use, to keep it for oneself, to do with or to it whatever the law allows one to do with what one owns, to sell it to another or give it away. The legal historian Douglas Hay suggests that it was in the eighteenth century that property rights surpassed all other rights in the social and legal imaginary; property, in effect, was “officially deified”. In classical liberal social, political, and legal theory, the rational individual pursues the accumulation of property. Literature often works in the tension between desire for property and its rejection in the name of something greater. In Twelve Years a Slave, inheritance comes in many forms, as freedom or slavery, as property, including slaves, and as a cultural attitude toward slavery and slaves. Much imaginative literature deals with issues of inheritance, legal and cultural.
