Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination: 128 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 128)
Cambridge University Press, 4/22/2021
EAN 9781108837484, ISBN10: 1108837484
Hardcover, 230 pages, 24.1 x 16.5 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena.
Introduction
Part I. Criminality
1. 'A Power Able to Overawe Them All'
Criminality and the Uses of Fear
2. 'The Social Life of Crime'
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug
Part II. Temporality
3. 'Injurious Pasts'
The Temporality of Caste
4. On Time
How Fiction Writes History in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
Part III. Adoption and Inheritance
5. 'The Begum's Fortune'
Adoption, Inheritance, and Private Property
6. 'Foundlings and Adoptees'
Filiality in George Eliot's Novels
Afterword
Bibliography.