Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature

Examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature.

Gregg D. Crane (Author)

9780521806848, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 January 2002

312 pages
23.7 x 15.6 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

Gregg D. Crane wins his laurels for a detailed and well-reasoned work of extraordinary intensity …'. American Studies

In this broad ranging and powerful study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Crane recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law into line with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression were evil. By documenting an actual historical interaction central both to American literature and American constitutional law, Crane reveals the influence of literature on the constitutional discourse of citizenship. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, and a whole range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this is a remarkable book, that will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Higher law in the 1850s
2. The look of higher law: Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery fiction
3. Cosmopolitan constitutionalism: Emerson and Douglass
4. The positivist alternative
5. Charles Chesnutt and Moorfield Storey: citizenship and the flux of contract.

Subject Areas: Regional studies [GTB], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]