Sandra Macpherson: Harm’s Way. Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2009.
Verlagsanzeigen: “Macpherson’s unique approach connects the rise of the novel to contemporary developments in liability law — in particular, to legal principles of strict liability that hold persons accountable for harms inflicted upon others in the absence of intention, consent, direct action, or foreknowledge. In fresh readings of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, she shows that these laws share with the novel the view that the state of a person’s mind is irrelevant to the question of her responsibility for her actions. Macpherson urges readers to rethink the ancient consensus that the novel differs from tragedy in its elevation of character over plot. She concludes that the realist novel is ultimately a tragic form, committed to holding persons accountable for accidents of fate”.
Das ist, so weit ich bis jetzt gekommen bin, keine leichte, aber doch lohnende Lektüre (ich bin, wie man sieht, ein L-Liebhaber). Man wird tief in die Geschichte der Haftung im Common Law eingetaucht, weil genau in dieser Geschichte die Antriebsenergie für die Romanproduktion des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts zu finden ist. Nur ein Beispiel aus der Einleitung:
“Defoe’s upping the ante on accidental harms by calling them murder is a thought experiment about the possibilities of strict liability. Legal developments in the 1730s and 1740s make Lovelace’s indictment for murder near the end of Clarissa, despite, as he insists, having merely raped the eponymous victim, a different kind of gesture. In chapter 2, I argue that Richardson self-consciously invokes a new criminal model of strict liability called “felony murder” to think through the issue of responsibility that so preoccupies Clarissa. The doctrine (articulated, among other locations, in the six-volume edition of State Trials Richardson printed in the late 1740s) made persons responsible not only for the unintended consequences of their own felonious acts (such as rape) but also for the consequences of acts that were not their own. Linked to the doctrine of agency, felony murder is similarly indifferent to questions of motive and individuation, holding principals accountable for the acts of accessories and accessories accountable for the acts of principals, ruthlessly tying individuals to outcomes they could not have anticipated and to others from whom, and from whose acts, they might want to be distinguished. There is a genuine sense in which felony murder conceives of acts and agents as indistinguishable from one another—conflating them into a single action, the action, one might want to say, of plot” (S. 13 f.).
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