This original and wide-ranging study shows how changing attitudes to evidence, trial and revelation in law and theology had a profound impact on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm, who is both a lawyer and a literary critic, argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy that both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their story-telling counterparts of the criminal Bar, and traces the ongoing debate over rules of evidence, eye-witness testimony and codes of ethical conduct that helped shape Victorian realism as a narrative form.

This original and wide-ranging study shows how changing attitudes to evidence, trial and revelation in law and theology had a profound impact on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm, who is both a lawyer and a literary critic, argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy that both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their story-telling counterparts of the criminal Bar, and traces the ongoing debate over rules of evidence, eye-witness testimony and codes of ethical conduct that helped shape Victorian realism as a narrative form.

Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the...

This book explores how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. Each chapter presents fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict. The range of literature examined complements the rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice that the contributors discuss.