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Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Author: Erin Sheley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9781474450102

Published In: April 2020
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: Scotland ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Paperback Edition ISBN: 9781474450119

S$215.28

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A new framework for examining the relationship between individual and cultural trauma, literary texts and common law.

Performs transformative interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period
Uncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itself
Draws on three case studies – adultery, child criminality and rape testimony – to demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the 18th and 19th centuries

Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary ‘construction’ of childhood by 19th-century fairy tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.

Readings include:

Charles Brockden Brown's 'Wieland and Ormond'
Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles'
Charles Kingsley's 'The Water-Babies'
George MacDonald's 'The Lost Princess'
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King'
Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre'
Henry Fielding's 'The Modern Husband'
Sir Walter Scott's 'Heart of Midlothian'
Samuel Richardson's 'Clarissa'