'In this superb book, Leila Neti uncovers some of the historical ways that literature and law co-operated across the Anglo-Indian colonial divide to imagine, produce, and contest political subjectivities and claims of sovereignty. In meticulous parallel readings of canonical Victorian novels and British judicial opinions on important Indian legal cases, she reveals how the cultural logic and epistemic violence of colonial administrative domination were being worked out, for other ends, in the pages of popular domestic fiction. Neti brings an invigorating postcolonial perspective to the interdisciplinary field of law and literature.' Joseph R. Slaughter, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York
Introduction; Part I. Criminality: 1. 'A Power Able to Overawe Them All': Criminality and the Uses of Fear; 2. 'The Social Life of Crime': Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug; Part II. Temporality: 3. 'Injurious Pasts': The Temporality of Caste; 4. On Time: How Fiction Writes History in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone; Part III. Adoption and Inheritance: 5. 'The Begum's Fortune': Adoption, Inheritance, and Private Property; 6. 'Foundlings and Adoptees': Filiality in George Eliot's Novels; Afterword; Bibliography.