Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology

Examines how the changing role of evidence in law and theology shaped nineteenth-century literary narrative.

Jan-Melissa Schramm (Author)

9780521771238, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 April 2000

264 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.7 x 16.1 x 2.1 cm, 0.5 kg

"...Schramm's work not only reaches back into the eighteenth century, but has important implications for contemporary law and literature theorists... this book is extraordinarily rich in its treatment of Victorian culture." Nineteenth Century Contexts

The eighteenth-century model of the criminal trial - with its insistence that the defendant and the facts of a case could 'speak for themselves' - was abandoned in 1836, when legislation enabled barristers to address the jury on behalf of prisoners charged with felony. Increasingly, professional acts of interpretation were seen as necessary to achieve a just verdict, thereby silencing the prisoner and affecting the testimony given by eye witnesses at criminal trials. Jan-Melissa Schramm examines the profound impact of the changing nature of evidence in law and theology on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Already a locus of theological conflict, the idea of testimony became a fiercely contested motif of Victorian debate about the ethics of literary and legal representation. She argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their storytelling counterparts at the Bar.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: justice and the impulse to narrate
1. Eye-witness testimony in the construction of narrative
2. The origins of the novel and the genesis of the law of evidence
3. Criminal advocacy and Victorian realism
4. The martyr as witness: inspiration and the appeal to intuition
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]