Law and Literature

Law and Literature presents a comprehensive overview of literature's critical interest in and historical interactions with ideas of law and justice.

Kieran Dolin (Edited by)

9781108422819, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 January 2018

396 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.67 kg

Law and Literature presents an authoritative, fresh and accessible new overview of the many ways in which law and literature interact. Written by a team of international experts, it provides a multi-focused history of literary studies' critical interest in ideas of law and justice. It examines the effects of law on writers and their work, ranging from classical tragedy to comics, and from East Africa to Elizabethan England. Over twenty chapters, contributors reveal the intricate and multivalent historical interactions between law and literature, both past and present, and trace the intellectual genesis of the concept of law in literary studies, focusing on major developments in the history of the interdisciplinary project of law and literature, as well as the changing ideas of law, and the cultural contests in which it has figured. Law and Literature will appeal to graduates and scholars working on the intersection between law and literature and in key related areas such as literature and human rights.

Introduction Kieran Dolin
Part I. Origins: 1. The revival of legal humanism Klaus Stierstorfer
2. Law meets critical theory Peter Leman
3. Narrative and law Cathrine O. Frank
4. Law and literature and history Christine L. Krueger
Part II. Development: 5. Law and literature in the ancient world Ioannis Ziogas
6. The 'parallel evolutions' of medieval law and literature Stephen Yeager
7. Literature and equity in early modern England Mark Fortier
8. Gender, law and the birth of bourgeois civil society Cheryl Nixon
9. Romanticism, Gothicism and law Bridget Marshall
10. Strange cases in Victorian Britain: Browning to Wilde Kieran Dolin
11. Forming the nation in nineteenth-century America Nan Goodman
12. Legal modernism Rex Ferguson
13. Representing lawyers in contemporary American literature: the case of O. J. Simpson Diana Shahinyan
14. Law in contemporary Anglophone literature Eugene McNulty
15. Narrative and legal plurality in postcolonial nations: chapter and verse from the East African Court of appeal Stephanie Jones
Part III. Applications: 16. Literary representations and social justice in an age of civil rights: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Helle Porsdam
17. Trauma, narrative and literary or legal justice Golnar Nabizadeh
18. The regulation of authorship: literary property and the aesthetics of distance Robin Wharton
19. Cases as cultural events: privacy, the Hossack Trial and Susan Glaspell's 'A Journey of her Peers' Marco Wan
20. Creativity and censorship laws: lessons from the 1920s Nancy Paxton.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]