By Christine L. Krueger
Taking her name from the British time period for felony examine, "to learn for the law," Christine L. Krueger asks how "reading for the legislation" as literary background contributes to the innovative academic reasons of the legislation and Literature move. She argues multidisciplinary "historical narrative jurisprudence" strengthens narrative felony theorists' claims for the transformative powers of reports via changing an ahistorical competition among literature and legislation with a background in their interdependence, and their embeddedness in print tradition. concentrating on gender and feminist advocacy within the lengthy 19th century, Reading for the Law demonstrates the relevance of literary background to feminist jurisprudence and indicates how literary background may perhaps give a contribution to different kinds of "outsider jurisprudence."
Krueger develops this argument throughout discussions of key jurisprudential thoughts: precedent, organization, testimony, and rationale. She attracts from quite a lot of literary, criminal, and old resources, from the early glossy interval in the course of the Victorian age, in addition to from modern literary, feminist, and felony conception. themes thought of contain the legacy of witchcraft prosecutions, the evolution of the moderate guy ordinary of proof in lunacy inquiries, the destiny of girl witnesses and pro se litigants, advocacy for woman prisoners and infanticide defendants, and safety ideas for males accused of indecent attack and sodomy. The saliency of the nineteenth-century British literary tradition stems partially from its position in a politico-legal culture that produces the very stipulations of narrative criminal theorists’ aspirations for significant social transformation in smooth, multicultural democracies.
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Additional resources for Reading for the Law: British Literary History and Gender Advocacy
Sample text
For these feminist and Critical Race theorists, narrative jurisprudence must encompass storytelling generally if it genuinely seeks knowledge of “people to whom we had previously not attended,” for their stories may not be recognizable as “literature” at all. Once again, historians of nineteenth-century culture find themselves on familiar ground, since our domain has comprehended not only William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold but also Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot, William Cobbett and Hannah More, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Ellen Johnston (the “Factory Girl” poet), as well as the texts of so-called popular culture, from Reynolds’s Newspaper (for the working classes) to melodramas such as Black-eyed Susan.
Early modern witchcraft prosecution provided twentieth-century political critique with one of its central tropes. The first usage recorded by the OED for “witch hunt” as meaning “a single-minded and uncompromising campaign against a group of people with unacceptable behavior, spec. Communists; esp. 12 Witch-hunting represented for Orwell the fundamental threat to democratic freedoms and processes posed by totalitarian states. The witch trial may symbolize not merely an abuse of legal power, but the illegitimacy of an entire legal system or of the state itself.
Perhaps these women were too close to the times of persecution to risk identifying with the witch. Indeed, a few years before Gaskell wrote Lois the Witch, her friends William and Mary Howitt translated and edited Joseph Ennemoser’s The History of Magic (1854), which articulates an ethnographic approach to witchcraft. ” 6 As Alex Owen and Diana Basham have documented, women’s interests in spiritualism and the occult, particularly as they provided political leverage and authorized them as agents, all too often became evidence for lunacy commitments and other forms of persecution, as I will discuss in part 2.