ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how serious political discourse on inheritance not only might make references to literary texts, but might sometimes even rely on literary narratives for its understanding of the workings of inheritance within families. It presents an avuncular narrative pattern which exists, over and against the patrilinear pattern of Hamlet. The chapter explores the unique position of the strange figure of the uncle within the narrative manifestations of nineteenth-century French family knowledge. It focuses on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's intuitions with some very different French literary texts, and specifically with French narratives of avuncular inheritance — for it may well be that the role of the uncle in the nineteenth-century French imagination is inseparable from his successional position. The chapter highlights some explicitly definitional moments in Balzac's novels which, taken together, produce a rather incoherent compendium of knowledge about avuncular figures — that is, aunts and uncles.
