Reconstituting authority : American fiction in the province of the law, 1880-1920 / William E. Moddelmog.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Moddelmog, William E., 1961-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Legal stories, American--History and criticism.

Legal stories, American.

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

American fiction.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

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

Law and literature.

Law and literature--History--20th century.

Authority in literature.

Law in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (289 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, c2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Reconstituting Authority, William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority.Moddelmog does not assume a sharp distinction between literary and legal institutions and

Contents:

Acknowledgments; Introduction Professionalism in Law and Literature; Chapter 1 The "Official" Narratives of William Dean Howells; Chapter 2 Helen Hunt Jackson and the Romance of Indian Nationhood; Chapter 3 Narrating Citizenship in Pauline Hopkins's ""Contending Forces""; Chapter 4 Charles Chesnutt's Fictions of Ownership; Chapter 5 Privacy and Subjectivity in Edith Wharton's ""The House of Mirth""; Chapter 6 Theodore Dreiser's Progressive Nostalgia; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-268) and index.

ISBN:

9781587293375

1587293374

OCLC:

50321017