Character : writing and reputation in Victorian law and literature / Cathrine O. Frank.

Author
Frank, Cathrine O. [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2022]
  • ©2022
Description
vii, 245 pages ; 24 cm.

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PR468.L38 F73 2022 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    Edinburgh critical studies in law, literature and the humanities [More in this series]
    Summary note
    Why would Hawthorne and Eliot grant their fallen women an anachronistic right to silence that could only worsen their punishment? Why did Bronte and Gaskell find gossip such a useful source of information when lawyers excluded it as hearsay? How did Trollope?s work as an editor influence his preoccupation throughout his novels with libel?0Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, Victorian periodical literature, legislative debate, case law, and legal treatise, Cathrine O. Frank traces the ways conventions of literary characterisation mingled with character-centred legal developments to produce a jurisprudential theory of character that extends beyond the legal profession. She explores how key categories and representational strategies for imagining individual personhood also defined communities and mediated relations within them, in life and in fiction.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-237) and index.
    Contents
    • Introduction: Character-building: narrative theory, narrative jurisprudence, and the idea of character
    • Incriminating character: revisiting the right to silence in Adam Bede and The scarlet letter
    • Gossip, hearsay, and the characte exception: reputation on trial in The tenant of Wildfell Hall and R v Rowton
    • Defamation of characterz; Anthony Trollope and the law of libel
    • Dignity, disclosure, and the right of privacy: the strange characters of Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Greay
    • The English Dreyfus Case: status as character in the illiberal age.
    ISBN
    • 1474485707 ((hardcover))
    • 9781474485708 ((hardcover))
    OCLC
    1264139336
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