A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature [Paperback]

This 2007 text charts the history of the shifting relations between law and literature, from the Renaissance to contemporary culture.Kieran Dolin charts the history of the shifting relations between law and literature, from the Renaissance to contemporary culture. This book provides an accessible guide to one of the most exciting areas of interdisciplinary scholarship today.Kieran Dolin charts the history of the shifting relations between law and literature, from the Renaissance to contemporary culture. This book provides an accessible guide to one of the most exciting areas of interdisciplinary scholarship today.Kieran Dolin introduces the interdisciplinary study of law and literature and charts the history of the shifting relations between the two disciplines, from the open affiliation between literature and law in the sixteenth-century Inns of Court to the less visible links of contemporary culture. Each chapter is organised around a famous trial or literary-legal encounter. The wide resonance of such trials illuminates the cultural centrality of law, and the social responsiveness of literature. This book provides an accessible guide to one of the most exciting areas of interdisciplinary scholarship today.Preface; Introduction: law and literature: walking the boundary with Robert Frost and the Supreme Court; Part I. Eminent Domains: The Text of the Law and the Law of the Text: 1. Law's language; 2. Literature under the law; Part II. Law and Literature in History: 3. Renaissance humanism and the new culture of contract; 4. Crime and punishment in the eighteenth century; 5. The woman question in Victorian England; 6. The Common Law and the ache of modernism; 7. Rumpole in Africa: law, literature and post-colonial society; 8. Race and representation in contemporary America; Conclusion; Bibliography.Review of the hardback: 'A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature is a welcome publication &' International Journal for the Semiotics of Law