Focusing on European and American trial fiction since about 1880, Dark Mirror argues that although it is generally animated by a sense of injustice, this literature reflects the virtual collapse in Western culture of the idea of a universal, or natural, ethical law. From the ancient Greeks to the Victorians, that idea, though powerfully contested by the notion that justice was simply the interest of the stronger, remained vigorously alive in books as in people's minds. It thus constituted an alternative to injustice which modern literature, whether its angle is religious, social, or...

Focusing on European and American trial fiction since about 1880, Dark Mirror argues that although it is generally animated by a sense of injustice, this literature reflects the virtual collapse in Western culture of the idea of a universal, or natural, ethical law. From the ancient Greeks to the Victorians, that idea, though powerfully contested by the notion that justice was simply the interest of the stronger, remained vigorously alive in books as in people's minds. It thus constituted an alternative to injustice which modern literature, whether its angle is religious, social, or...