Böcker i Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities-serien

By reading two bodies of literature not normally read together - the outlaw literature and espionage literature - Conor McCarthy shows how these genres represent and critique the longstanding use of legal exclusion as a means of supporting state power. Texts discussed range from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare's history plays, and versions of the Ned Kelly story to contemporary writing by John le Carre, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson.

Imagined States examines representations of the law in British and Nigerian high-brow, middle-brow and popular fiction and journalism. It reads works by Chinua Achebe, Joyce Cary, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace, together with a range of Nigerian market literature and journalism.

Imagined States examines representations of the law in British and Nigerian high-brow, middle-brow and popular fiction and journalism. Drawing on a rich range of examples, the book focuses on the imaginative role that the state of exception played in the application of indirect rule during British colonialism and in the legal machinations of the postcolonial state. It reads works by Chinua Achebe, Joyce Cary, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace, together with a range of Nigerian market literature and journalism.

By accessing penal history through the mediator of individual memory authors can be seen to depict the cumulative dialogue between the English common law and its cultural representations across historical time. Offering legal readings of works by authors including Thomas Hardy, Charles Brockden Brown, Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Browning, Henry Fielding and Sir Walter Scott; this book explores this literary phenomenon and its legal significance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In doing so it argues that the importance of precedent in Anglo-American common law creates a unique discourse of historical legitimacy that shapes both the cultural and official conceptions of criminality itself during this period. Within a Foucauldian framework, the book illustrates how the cultural memory of crime and punishment contribute to the development of formal and informal penal institutions. Key Features:*Generates a new framework for analysing the relationship between individual and cultural narratives, literary texts, and the cumulative "e;truth"e; created by the common law*Provides three case studies of adultery, child criminality, and rape testimony that demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.*Legal readings of works by authors including Thomas Hardy, Charles Brockden Brown, Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bront Robert Browning, Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott *Transformative readings of widely read works including Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Ormond, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Charlotte Bronts Jayne Eyre, Henry Fielding's The Modern Husband and Sir Walter Scott 's Heart of Midlothian

Through detailed readings of popular science fiction, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television's Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this is the first sustained examination of legality in science fiction.

A reflection on interdisciplinarity in legal studies against the background of the dispute between the natural sciences and the humanities

Peter Goodrich looks beyond Judge Schreber's mental health to evaluate his jurisprudential theory. Goodrich analyses Schreber's Memoirs, interpreters and intellectual context to show how Schreber challenges the legal thought of his era and opens up a potentially vital approach to contemporary jurisprudence.

Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony.