The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other

This book combines legal as well as political and theoretical questions in a variety of contexts, ranging from legal issues in the early modern period to critical explorations of law/s, justice and textuality in contemporary literature and culture. The essays in this volume offer critical perspectives on the role of literature and theory in relation to the law and explore otherness and justice in early modern, Victorian and contemporary texts, postmodern theory, colonial and postcolonial contexts and popular culture. Examining how legal and literary narratives construct, repress, legitimise, but also enable the Other, this volume offers new insights into forms of alterity, marginality and exclusion and articulates the imperative need to reconfigure issues of justice as always intertwined with the Other.

Exklusives Verkaufsrecht für: Gesamte Welt.

Contents: Costas Douzinas: The Letter of the Law and the Spirit of Literature - Stamatina Dimakopoulou/Christina Dokou/Efterpi Mitsi: The Other as the (Purloined) Letter of the Law - Kinga Földváry: Outlaw or Above the Law? Legal Issues in William Harrison's Description of England - Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou: Law, Justice and Poetry in Faerie Land - Zoe Detsi-Diamanti: Legal Exclusion vs. Republican Inclusion in Judith S. Murray's The Traveller Returned (1796) - Nic Panagopoulos: Sovereign Law and Bare Life in Bleak House - Sheila Teahan: The Remedy of Law - Ava Baron: Happy Ending for Women Workers, or Tragedy for the Workplace? Cultural and Legal Narratives of Sexual Harassment in the United States - Jeffrey L. Spear: Was She This Name? Law, Literature and the «Devadasi» - Helen Nicholson: «Portia in Petticoats»: The Legal Performances of Georgina Weldon - Christina Dokou: Courtroom Humour, Performative Justice: The Case of Harper Lee vs. Fannie Flagg - Maria Vara: «Victim Precipitation» in the Anti-detective Fiction of Muriel Spark and Diane Johnson - Yannis Stamos: Literature Before the Law: Derrida on the Democratic «Right to Say Everything» - Elina Staikou: Burning Dead Letters: Bartleby, Law and Literature in the Nuclear Age - Shela Sheikh: Bartleby - Derrida: Literature, Law and Responsibility - Cláudia Trabuco: Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur? Authorship, Originality and the Work of Vergílio Ferreira - Anna-Maria Piskopani: Reality-flirting Literature as an Aliud in Defamation and Privacy Law.

This volume offers critical perspectives on the role of literature and theory in relation to the law and explores otherness and justice in early modern, Victorian and contemporary texts, postmodern theory, (post-)colonial contexts and popular culture. The essays reveal the need to reconfigure issues of justice as always intertwined with the Other.