Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 21)

In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White Jacket, Pierre and "Bartleby" (worker exploitation or wage slavery), The Confidence-Man (contracts), and finally, "Billy Budd," which examines a number of issues illustrative of the triumph of legal formalism after the Civil War. Weaving together legal and literary history, Cross-examinations of law and literature focuses on one aspect of antebellum American culture: the unique relationship between law and literature. Thomas reads legal history through the lens of individual works of literature (Cooper's The Pioneers, Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and selected works by Melville), to show how the period's legal reasoning achieves much of its persuasive power. In his view, legal discourse relied on and helped to shape the narratives that many Americans constructed about the conflicts between the law of the heart and that of the head, between the private and public spheres, and between the individual and society (cover). Few would argue with the statement that The Pioneers is a novel about the transformation of America from wilderness to civilization. Brook Thomas. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 256-291.