Law and Literature Journeys From Her to Eternity [Paperback]

Any attempt to understand the world by means of language, in law or in literature, imposes an artificial order on what is beyond our comprehension. However, whilst literature admits its own artificiality, law insists that it provides not only all the answers but all the right answers. Using examples ranging from Greek myth to contemporary writing, film and popular music, Aristodemou works from the assumption that not just literature but also law are fictions, and she suggests ways in which literature can help us understand better the mythic origins of law. In doing so she shows how we can learn from the law-making qualities of literature new ways of addressing and living with the fictionality of law.

1. Inventing Reality
2. Myths of Origins and Origins of Myths: Beyond Oedipus?
3. Theatre as Woman Re-Playing the Word: Towards the Triumph of the Flesh in Aeschylus' Oresteia
4. The Marriage of Death and Desire in Measure for Measure
5. World Before and Beyond Difference: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
6. Law in the Realm of the Senses: Camus's Outsider
7. Fantasies of Women as Law-Makers in Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers
8. Archive Fever that Misses the Fire: Legal and Other Textual Memories in Chronicle of a Death Foretold
9. Language, Ethics, and the Imagination in Toni Morrison's Beloved
10. Dream Harder: For a Goddess in Borges' Fiction
11. Inventing Reality: The Lawyer in His Labyrinth and From Her to Eternity

The great power of this text is its acceptance and delight in uncertainty, its fearless clinch with contradiction, its assertion that even the ethics of failure are to be feted. It is hoped that this book is widely read, no least on all those courses entitled Law and Literature. --Feminist LegalStudies

Maria Aristodemouis Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck College, London.