Erin Sheley

Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

By accessing penal history through the mediator of individual memory authors can be seen to depict the cumulative dialogue between the English common law and its cultural representations across historical time. Offering legal readings of works by authors including Thomas Hardy, Charles Brockden Brown, Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning, Henry Fielding and Sir Walter Scott; this book explores this literary phenomenon and its legal significance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In doing so it argues that the importance of precedent in Anglo-American common law creates a unique discourse of historical legitimacy that shapes both the cultural and official conceptions of criminality itself during this period. Within a Foucauldian framework, the book illustrates how the cultural memory of crime and punishment contribute to the development of formal and informal penal institutions. Key Features:*Generates a new framework for analysing the relationship between individual and cultural narratives, literary texts, and the cumulative "e;truth"e; created by the common law*Provides three case studies of adultery, child criminality, and rape testimony that demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.*Legal readings of works by authors including Thomas Hardy, Charles Brockden Brown, Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning, Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott *Transformative readings of widely read works including Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Ormond, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Charlotte Bronte's Jayne Eyre, Henry Fielding's The Modern Husband and Sir Walter Scott 's Heart of Midlothian

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Edinburgh University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. April 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781474450133
• Artikelnr.: 72413079

Autorenporträt

Erin Sheley is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Her legal research considers how the law should account for subjectivity in measuring and punishing criminal and tort harm. Her work has appeared in such journals as the North Carolina Law Review, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the Wake Forest Law Review, and the Indiana Law Review. Her literary scholarship has appeared in the Byron Journal, the Southern Literary Journal, Law and Literature, and Law, Culture and the Humanities. She holds an A.B. and J.D. from Harvard University and a PhD in English from the George Washington University.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: The Tolbooth Door
Part I: Adultery as Actus Reus
1. Adultery, Criminality, and the Myth of English Sovereignty
2. The Gothic Law of Marriage
Part II: Child Criminality as Mens Rea
3. 'The Faerie Court' of Child Punishment
Part III: The Rape Victim as Evidence
4. The Rape Novel and Reputation Evidence
5. Literary Rape Trials and the Trauma of National Identity
Coda: Leaving Midlothian
Bibliography