Jonathan Kertzer: Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions: Studies in Literary Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press 2010.
Verlagsanzeige (incl. ToC etc.): “Literature reveals the intense efforts of moral imagination required to articulate what justice is and how it might be satisfied. Examining a wide variety of texts including Shakespeare’s plays, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, and modernist poetics, Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions explores how literary laws and values illuminate and challenge the jurisdiction of justice and the law. Jonathan Kertzer examines how justice is articulated by its command of, or submission to, time, nature, singularity, truth, transcendence and sacrifice, marking the distance between the promise of justice to satisfy our moral and sociable needs and its failure to do so. Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions will be invaluable reading for scholars of the law within literature and amongst modernist and twentieth century literature specialists”.
From the Introduction: “Literary designs are always fatal, whether the verdict is marriage in comedy or death in tragedy. Death is a poetically just ending in tragedy, not because it is what the hero deserves, but because it fulfills a pattern imposed internally by the plot, and externally by the generic laws governing tragedy. Tragic heroes like Hamlet rarely deserve their catastrophic fates, which is why tragedy is a transgressive genre that looks for something beyond justice, something that justice cannot satisfy”.
Susan Sage Heinzelman: Riding the Black Ram: Law, Literature, and Gender. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Law Books 2010.
Verlagsanzeige (incl. ToC etc.): “In her 1820 adultery trial, Queen Caroline was depicted in a cartoon riding into the House of Lords on a black ram that had the face of her Italian lover. As this book reveals, a number of women, remembered largely for their insubordinate presence, have metaphorically “ridden the black ram” in the last 700 years. Heinzelman’s historicized understanding of the relationship between law and literature reveals a disquieting pattern in the legal and literary representations of women and provides a new recognition of the significance of sexuality and gender in the way we narrate our world”.
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see. nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starv’d and stabb’d in the untill’d field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edg’d sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,
Religion Christless, Godless—a book seal’d,
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. (P. B. Shelley, Quelle)
Verwandte Artikel: