Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology [Paperback]

Examines how the changing role of evidence in law and theology shaped nineteenth-century literary narrative.This original and wide-ranging study shows how changing attitudes to evidence, trial and revelation in law and theology had a profound impact on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their story-telling counterparts of the criminal Bar, and traces the ongoing debate over rules of evidence, eye-witness testimony and codes of ethical conduct that helped shape Victorian realism as a narrative form.This original and wide-ranging study shows how changing attitudes to evidence, trial and revelation in law and theology had a profound impact on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their story-telling counterparts of the criminal Bar, and traces the ongoing debate over rules of evidence, eye-witness testimony and codes of ethical conduct that helped shape Victorian realism as a narrative form.This original and wide-ranging study shows how changing attitudes to evidence, trial and revelation in law and theology had a profound impact on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm, who is both a lawyer and a literary critic, argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy that both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their story-telling counterparts of the criminal Bar, and traces the ongoing debate over rules of evidence, eye-witness testimony and codes of ethical conduct that helped shape Victorian realism as a narrative form.Acknowledgements; Introduction: justice and the impulse to narrate; 1. Eye-witness testimony in the construction of narrative; 2. The origins of the novel and the genesis of the law of evidence;lCh