Taking Exception to the Law : : Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature / / ed. by Donald Beecher, Grant Williams, Andrew Wallace, Travis DeCook.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter ACUP Complete eBook-Package 2015
• HerausgeberIn: Beecher, Donald,; DeCook, Travis,; Wallace, Andrew,; Williams, Grant,
• MitwirkendeR: Cormack, Bradin,; Hanson, Elizabeth,; Kreps, Barbara,; Lee Strain, Virginia,; Owens, Judith,; Shuger, Debora,; Staines, John D.,; Stevens, Paul,; Stretton, Tim,; Stymeist, David,; Visconsi, Elliott,; Williams, Grant,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.) :; 6 b&w illustrations

Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions. From canonical poems and plays to crime pamphlets and educational treatises, the essays engage with the relevance and wide appeal of legal questions in order to understand how literature operated in the early modern period.Justice in its many forms – legal, poetic, divine, natural, and customary – is examined through insightful and innovative analyses of a number of texts, including The Merchant of Venice, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. A major contribution to the growing field of law and literature, this collection offers cultural contexts, interpretive insights, and formal implications for the entire field of English Renaissance culture.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Law and the Production of Literature: An Introductory Perspective -- 2. Paper Justice, Parchment Justice: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and the Life of Legal Documents -- 3. Conditional Promises and Legal Instruments in The Merchant of Venice -- 4. The “Snared Subject” and the General Pardon Statute in Late Elizabethan Coterie Literature -- 5. The Prison Diaries of Archbishop Laud -- 6. Criminal Biography in Early Modern News Pamphlets -- 7. Two-Sided Legal Narratives: Slander, Evidence, Proof, and Turnarounds in Much Ado About Nothing -- 8. No Boy Left Behind: Education and Distributive Justice in Early Modern England -- 9. Warding off Injustice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene -- 10. Torture and the Tyrant’s Injustice from Foxe to King Lear -- 11. The Literatures of Toleration and Civil Religion in Post-Revolutionary England -- 12. Obnoxious Satan: Milton, Neo-Roman Justice, and the Burden of Grace -- Contributors -- Index