Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature

ISBN-13: 9780521623322 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 244 str.

Kieran Dolin

Opis

Law and literature have been two of the most powerful discourses in the construction of social reality. The relationship between the two has emerged as a vital new area of study, as literature has influenced popular understanding of law. Utilizing legal and literary theory, Kieran Dolin examines the interplay between legal discourse and the novel in the century between Walter Scott and E. M. Forster. This comprehensive study draws on legal and literary theory to trace this important convergence of disciplines in a series of canonical Victorian and Modernist texts.

Recenzje

"Dolin's analyses are insightful and thoroughly researched. They will undoubtedly inspire others to return to familiar texts, and to look for individual instances in which the law and literature serve as dynamic forces that play off one another in the construction of society and culture." George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, Kurt Neumann, William Rainey Harper College

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; 1. Narrative forms and normative worlds; 2. The modern Western nomos; 3. True testimony and the foundation of nomos - The Heart of Midlothian; 4. Reformist critique in the mid-Victorian 'legal novel' - Bleak House; 5. Representation, inheritance and anti-reformism in the 'legal novel' - Orley Farm; 6. Power, chance and the rule of law - Billy Budd, Sailor; 7. From sympathetic criminal to imperial law-giver - Lord Jim; 8. Freedom, uncertainty and diversity - the critique of imperialist law in A Passage to India; 9. Settling out of court; Notes; Index.