(Source: Cornell University Press)
Coming December, Cornell University
Press is publishing a book on literature and international law in Early Modern
Europe.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In early modern Europe,
international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly
consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for
the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and
uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would
create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World
Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a
literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed
to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law
coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to
its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it,
often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary
solutions.
Tang highlights the various modes in
which literary texts - some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille,
Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth
rediscovering - engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to
the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history
of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book
approaches the development of international law in this period —its so-called
classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang
recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order
and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European
languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chenxi Tang is Professor of
German, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The
Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in
German Romanticism.
More information here
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