Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in U.S. American Culture (Law & Literature Book 1)

The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley’s famous phrase “the legislator of the world”, it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence. * critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction * comprehensive overview of the intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture * analysis of prominent literary examples from the 18th to the 20th century

The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley’s famous phrase “the legislator of the world”, it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.

The book follows the changing relationship and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, by discussing exemplary novels by Charles B. Brown, J. Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis. Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence Chapter 1. Law, Literature, and the Predicament of Representation Chapter 2. Legitimate Fictions: Rhetoric and Evidence in the Law-and-Literature Movement Chapter 3. Wieland’s Testimony: Charles Brockden Brown and the Rhetoric of Evidence Chapter 4. The Judge and the Code: James Fenimore Cooper and the Common Law of Literature Chapter 5. Evidence and Identification: The Case(s) of To Kill a Mockingbird Chapter 6. Dissenting Opinions: William Gaddis, Alan Dershowitz, and the Spectacles of Media Justice Bibliography Biographical note: Peter Schneck, University ofOsnabrück, Germany