Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Narrative forms and normative worlds
- 2 The modern Western nomos
- 3 True testimony and the foundation of nomos – The Heart of Midlothian
- 4 Reformist critique in the mid-Victorian “legal novel” – Bleak House
- 5 Representation, inheritance and anti-reformism in the “legal novel” – Orley Farm
- 6 Power, chance and the rule of law – Billy Budd, Sailor
- 7 From sympathetic criminal to imperial law-giver – Lord Jim
- 8 Freedom, uncertainty and diversity – the critique of imperialist law in A Passage to India
- 9 Settling out of court
- Notes
- Index
2 - The modern Western nomos
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Narrative forms and normative worlds
- 2 The modern Western nomos
- 3 True testimony and the foundation of nomos – The Heart of Midlothian
- 4 Reformist critique in the mid-Victorian “legal novel” – Bleak House
- 5 Representation, inheritance and anti-reformism in the “legal novel” – Orley Farm
- 6 Power, chance and the rule of law – Billy Budd, Sailor
- 7 From sympathetic criminal to imperial law-giver – Lord Jim
- 8 Freedom, uncertainty and diversity – the critique of imperialist law in A Passage to India
- 9 Settling out of court
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The study of fictional representations of law demands a contextual criticism. In this chapter I attempt to establish this context for the subsequent analysis of my chosen novels by presenting a short account of the intellectual and social history of European law since the eighteenth century. The ultimate aim is not to supply a mere background for critical analysis, but to enable the novels themselves to be read as texts in the cultural history of the modern nomos. For Cover, every normative world is specific to the culture which gives birth to it. The “thickness of legal meaning” in every society must be comprehended before its juridical practices can be properly understood. In the following essay in the “thick description” of modern, Western law I aim to establish what Dominick LaCapra calls a “viable interaction between the forms of literature and forms of life” in the post-Enlightenment era and to establish some specific connections between these developments and formal and thematic changes in the novel's treatment of law.
The “noble pile” under attack
There is no more paideic paragraph in English legal writing than the conclusion to Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England(1765–9). Here Blackstone articulates a “Whig interpretation” of the development of English law, in which its “fundamental maxims and rules … have been and are everyday improving, and are now fraught with the accumulated wisdom of the ages.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fiction and the LawLegal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature, pp. 21 - 44Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999