BOOK: Erin SHELEY, Criminality and the English Common Law - Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). ISBN 9781474450102, £75.00

(Source: Edinburgh University Press)

Edinburgh University Press is publishing a book on relationship between individual and cultural trauma, literary texts and English common law in the 18^th-19^th centuries.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A new framework for examining the relationship between individual and cultural trauma, literary texts and common law

• Performs transformative interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period
• Uncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itself
• Draws on three case studies – adultery, child criminality and rape testimony – to demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the 18th and 19th centuries

Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary ‘construction’ of childhood by 19th-century fairy tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erin Sheley is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Her legal research considers how the law should account for subjectivity in measuring and punishing criminal and tort harm. Her work has appeared in such journals as the North Carolina Law Review, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the Wake Forest Law Review, and the Indiana Law Review. Her literary scholarship has appeared in the Byron Journal, the Southern Literary Journal, Law and Literature, and Law, Culture and the Humanities. She holds an A.B. and J.D. from Harvard University and a PhD in English from the George Washington University.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Tolbooth Door

Part I: Adultery as Actus Reus
1. Adultery, Criminality, and the Myth of English Sovereignty
2. The Gothic Law of Marriage

Part II: Child Criminality as Mens Rea
3. ‘The Faerie Court’ of Child Punishment

Part III: The Rape Victim as Evidence
4. The Rape Novel and Reputation Evidence
5. Literary Rape Trials and the Trauma of National Identity

Coda: Leaving Midlothian
Bibliography

More info here