A critical introduction to law and literature / Kieran Dolin. electronic resource

Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-259) and index.

pt.1. Eminent domains: the text of the law and the law of the text . Law's language. Literature under the law -- pt.2. Law and literature in history. Renaissance humanism and the new culture of contract . Crime and punishment in the eighteenth century. The woman question in Victorian England. The common law and the ache of modernism. Rumpole in Africa: law and literature in post-colonial society. Race and representation in contemporary America.

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.