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The Criminal in Gothic Fiction and Contemporary Law: Literary and Legal Doubles

Coming Soon The Criminal in Gothic Fiction and Contemporary Law: Literary and Legal Doubles

The Criminal in Gothic Fiction and Contemporary Law: Literary and Legal Doubles

Author: Barbara Hughes-Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032260273
Published In: June 2026
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Contents

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This book transports prevailing criminal legal problems back to their Gothic origins at the close of the nineteenth century.

The Victorian fin-de-siècle was an age of both innovation and repression; a time when industry and empire alike worked to categorise, commodify, and control. It was a time in which law, literature, and the sciences were enmeshed in the gritty business of unpeeling the connections between minds and bodies, impulses and actions. The era spun concepts and spurred conversations which remain at the forefront of discussions around who we are and who we could be, right through to this very moment. Centring its analysis around three iconic novels from the era – Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Stoker’s Dracula, this book considers how these immortal novels live on in our cultural imagination, and provide vivid materials that can be used to more deeply understand how current criminal legal problems have mutated and evolved. Like the characters in such Gothic novels, the law creates and is haunted by its own doubles: the reasonable person, the compelled confessor, the career criminal. As well as producing interdisciplinary readings of literary and legal texts, this book develops a new typology of literary doubles intended to assist scholars engaging with themes of responsibility and legal fault. Itself an elusive figure of paradox and contradiction, the literary double is our ideal guide through the law’s Gothic hinterland.

This original and compelling study will appeal to scholars and students of law and literature, criminal law, legal history, and those intrigued by the things that go bump in the night.

1. Introduction: The Fin-de-Siècle’s Divided Self

2. Doubles, Doppelgängers and other Dangerous Things: (Re)Creating the Gothic Criminal

3. Character and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

4. Recklessness and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

5. Confessions and Bram Stoker’s Dracula

6. Conclusion: Towards a Synthesis of Self