Law and Literature

Law and Literature presents an authoritative, fresh and accessible new overview of the many ways in which law and literature interact. Written by a team of international experts, it provides a multi-focused history of literary studies' critical interest in ideas of law and justice. It examines the effects of law on writers and their work, ranging from classical tragedy to comics, and from East Africa to Elizabethan England. Over twenty chapters, contributors reveal the intricate and multivalent historical interactions between law and literature, both past and present, and trace the intellectual genesis of the concept of law in literary studies, focusing on major developments in the history of the interdisciplinary project of law and literature, as well as the changing ideas of law, and the cultural contests in which it has figured. Law and Literature will appeal to graduates and scholars working on the intersection between law and literature and in key related areas such as literature and human rights.

Introduction Kieran Dolin; Part I. Origins: 1. The revival of legal humanism Klaus Stierstorfer; 2. Law meets critical theory Peter Leman; 3. Narrative and law Cathrine O. Frank; 4. Law and literature and history Christine L. Krueger; Part II. Development: 5. Law and literature in the ancient world Ioannis Ziogas; 6. The 'parallel evolutions' of medieval law and literature Stephen Yeager; 7. Literature and equity in early modern England Mark Fortier; 8. Gender, law and the birth of bourgeois civil society Cheryl Nixon; 9. Romanticism, Gothicism and law Bridget Marshall; 10. Strange cases in Victorian Britain: Browning to Wilde Kieran Dolin; 11. Forming the nation in nineteenth-century America Nan Goodman; 12. Legal modernism Rex Ferguson; 13. Representing lawyers in contemporary American literature: the case of O. J. Simpson Diana Shahinyan; 14. Law in contemporary Anglophone literature Eugene McNulty; 15. Narrative and legal plurality in postcolonial nations: chapter and verse from the East African Court of appeal Stephanie Jones; Part III. Applications: 16. Literary representations and social justice in an age of civil rights: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Helle Porsdam; 17. Trauma, narrative and literary or legal justice Golnar Nabizadeh; 18. The regulation of authorship: literary property and the aesthetics of distance Robin Wharton; 19. Cases as cultural events: privacy, the Hossack Trial and Susan Glaspell's 'A Journey of her Peers' Marco Wan; 20. Creativity and censorship laws: lessons from the 1920s Nancy Paxton.

Kieran Dolin is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He is the author of Fiction and the Law (Cambridge, 1999) and A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (Cambridge, 2007).