Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries
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Description
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 Brontë, 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.
Publication Date
2020
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Keywords
cultural narrative, common law, legal history, literature, case study, interdisciplinary
Disciplines
Common Law | Legal History | Literature in English, British Isles
Digital USD Citation
Sheley, Erin, "Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries" (2020). Faculty Books. 100.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/law_fac_books/100