Character : writing and reputation in Victorian law and literature

Character, Writing, and Reputation in Victorian Law and Literature is a cultural and narratological study that takes the Victorian obsession with character at face value. Focused on the second half of the nineteenth century and offering new readings of novels by George Eliot, Anne Bronte, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde in conjunction with legal treatises, legislative debate, rules of evidence, and select case law, it pairs literary strategies for characterization with legal developments focused on forms of character evidence, on the reputational harm of libel, and on the increasing value of a legal protection for privacy. An introduction and five chapters bring together these cognate areas of law into what can be called a jurisprudential theory of character whose operation depends on the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure: between the legal allocation of responsibility in the construction of a criminal case and the allocation of narrative attention in the construction of the novel, both forms adjust the tension between an individual’s, or character’s, capacity to limit access to information and law’s, or literature’s, capacity to compel it in ways that emphasize the importance of individual character-building to the formation and maintenance of communal boundaries as well. Moreover, by utilizing forms of character talk, these processes highlight the narrative underpinnings of legal and literary realities: if it seems self-evident that the novel is a character-system, this book aims to make it equally obvious that law is a character-system, too. Examines legal and literary narratives of personhood in the 19th century Traces the concept of character through related areas of law, cultural discourses of character and the formal structures of the novel Offers new readings of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan DoyleAnalyses literary constructions of character in relation to specific legal cases and doctrines, including the right to silence, libel and privacyIncludes new work on Anthony Trollope's topical and editorial interest in libel Covers the relationship between libel, the development of privacy rights and emerging modernist aestheticsPresents a transatlantic approach to select works and issues, including the right to silence and privacy 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?Drawing 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 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