Imagining world order : literature and international law in early modern Europe, 1500-1800 / Chenxi Tang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tang, Chenxi, 1968- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Law in literature.

International relations in literature.

European literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

European literature--18th century--History and criticism.

European literature.

International law--History.

International law.

History.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 341 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018.

Summary:

"In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts--some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering--engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period--its so-called classical age--in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved"-- Publisher's Web site.

Contents:

The old world order dissolving

The poetics of international legal order

International order as tragedy

International order as romance

The divergence between international law and literature around 1700

The novel and international order in the eighteenth century.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Tang, Chenxi, 1968- Imagining world order.

ISBN:

9781501716911

1501716913

OCLC:

1028900348