Novel judgements : legal theory as fiction / William P. MacNeil.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

MacNeil, William P.

Series:

Discourses of law

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Law in literature.

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Law and literature--History--19th century.

Law and literature.

Culture and law.

Sociological jurisprudence.

History.

Physical Description:

xvii, 234 pages ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Legal theory as fiction

Place of Publication:

Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, [England] ; New York : Routledge, [2012]

Summary:

"Novel Judgements is a book about nineteenth century Anglo-American law and literature. But by redefining law as legal theory, Novel judgements departs from 'socio-legal' studies of law and literature, often dated in their focus on past lawyering and court processes. This texts 'theoretical turn' renders the period's 'law-and-literature' relevant to today's readers because the nineteenth century novel, when 'read jurisprudentially', abounds in representations of law's controlling concepts, many of which are still with us today. Rights, justice, law's morality; each are encoded novelistically in stock devices such as the country house, friendship, love, courtship and marriage. In so rendering the public (law) as private (domesticity), these novels expose for legal and literary scholars alike the ways in which law comes to mediate all relationships--individual and collective, personal and political--during the nineteenth century, a period as much under the Rule of Law as the reign of Capital. So these novels pass judgement--a novel judgement--on the extent to which the nineteenth century's idea of law is collusive with that era's Capital, thereby opening up the possibility of a new legal theoretical position: that of a critique of the law and a law of critique"--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Pro lex omenon : towards a novel legal theory of the novel as legal theory

John Austin or Jane Austen? : the province of jurisprudence determined in Pride and prejudice

Jousting with Bentham : utility, morality and ethics in Ivanhoe's tournament of law

The monstrous body of the law : Wollstonecraft vs. Shelley

Hawthorne's haunted house of law : the romance of American legal realism in The house of the seven gables

In Boz we trust! : Bleak house's (re)imagination of trusteeship

Two on a guillotine? : courts and 'crits' in A tale of two cities

Beyond governmentality : the question of justice in Great expectations

A jurisprudential postscript : century's close and the end of of the (meta)narrative of law.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780415459143

0415459141

9780415459150

041545915X

OCLC:

699378815