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Human rights -- Great Britain
Natural Law in literature
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Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries by
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. Key Features: *Generates a new framework for analysing the relationship between individual and cultural narratives, literary texts, and the cumulative "truth" 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 Brontë, 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 Brontë's Jayne Eyre, Henry Fielding's The Modern Husband and Sir Walter Scott 's Heart of Midlothian
Corporate Romanticism by
Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments--the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action--undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism's ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.
Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in The 1790s by
Following the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, ideas of the 'Natural Rights of Man' (later distinguished into particular issues like rights of association, rights of women, slaves, children and animals) were publicly debated in England. Literary figures like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Thelwall, Blake and Wordsworth reflected these struggles in their poetry and fiction. With the seminal influences of John Locke and Rousseau, these and many other writers laid for high Romantic Literature foundations that were not so much aesthetic as moral and political. This new study by R.S. White provides a reinterpretation of the Enlightenment as it is currently understood.
British State Romanticism by
British State Romanticism contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of their late work as evidence of declining abilities. Frey argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model that adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.
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