Law and Literature. Gender studies & British novel of 18th and 19th centuries

Martha C. Nussbaum & Alison LaCroix (eds.)

Subversion and sympathy: gender, law, and the British novel
Oxford University Press, New York, 2013, 336 pp.
ISBN: 9780199812042

This interdisciplinary volume of contributed essays focuses on issues of gender in the British novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Hardy and Trollope. Approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds, the contributors reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement by displaying a range of ways in which literature and law can illuminate one another and in which the conversation between them can illuminate deeper human issues with which both disciplines are concerned. Their chapters shed light on a range of gender-related issues, from inheritance to money-lending to illegitimacy, but also make an important methodological contribution by displaying (and discussing) a range of methodological perspectives that exemplify the breadth and range of this discipline, which links history, gender studies, philosophy, literary studies, and law.

Table of Contents

Preface, Diane P. Wood
Introduction, Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum

Part One

1. The Moral and Legal Consequences of Wife Selling in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Julie C. Suk
2. Jude the Obscure: The Irrelevance of Marriage Law, Amanda Claybaugh
3. The History of Obscenity, the British Novel, and the First Amendment, Geoffrey R. Stone
4. Jane Austen: Comedy and Social Structure, Richard A. Posner

Part Two

5. Pious Perjury in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, Julia Simon-Kerr
6. Rape, Seduction, Purity, and Shame in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Marcia Baron
7. The Stain of Illegitimacy: Gender, Law, and Trollopian Subversion, Martha C. Nussbaum
8. Could He Forgive Her? Gender, Agency, and Women's Criminality in the Novels of Anthony Trollope, Nicola Lacey

Part Three

9. Law, Commerce, and Gender in Trollope's Framley Parsonage, Douglas G. Baird
10. Primogeniture, Legal Change, and Trollope, Saul Levmore
11. Defoe's Formal Laws, Bernadette Meyler

Part Four

12. The Lawyer's Library in the Early American Republic, Alison L. LaCroix
13. Proposals and Performative Utterance in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Professional Man's Plight, Robert A. Ferguson
14. A Comeuppance Theory of Narrative and the Emotions, Blakey Vermeule


Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Alison LaCroix is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.