Imagining World Order : Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 / Chenxi Tang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tang, Chenxi, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

International law--History.

International law.

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

European literature.

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

International relations in literature.

Law in literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. The Old World Order Dissolving

2. The Poetics of International Legal Order

3. International Order as Tragedy

4. International Order as Romance

5. The Divergence between International Law and Literature around 1700

6. The Novel and International Order in the Eighteenth Century

Epilogue

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 16. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9781501716935

150171693X

OCLC:

1039187386