Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries / / Erin Sheley.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Sheley, Erin,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (264 p.)

A new framework for examining the relationship between individual and cultural trauma, literary texts and common lawPerforms transformative interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year periodUncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itselfDraws 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 centuriesErin 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 OrmondThomas Hardy's Tess of the d'UrbervillesCharles Kingsley's The Water-BabiesGeorge MacDonald's The Lost PrincessAlfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the KingCharlotte Brontë's Jane EyreHenry Fielding's The Modern Husband Sir Walter Scott's Heart of MidlothianSamuel Richardson's Clarissa

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Tolbooth Door -- Part I Adultery as Actus Reus -- 1 Adultery, Criminality, and the Myth of English Sovereignty -- 2 The Gothic Law of Marriage -- Part II Child Criminality as Mens Rea -- 3 The “Faerie Court” of Child Punishment -- Part III The Rape Victim as Evidence -- 4 The Rape Novel and Reputation Evidence -- 5 Literary Rape Trials and the Trauma of National Identity -- Coda: Leaving Midlothian -- Bibliography -- Index