Novel judgements : legal theory as fiction / William P. MacNeil.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-225) and index.

Prolexomenon : towards a novel legal theory of the novel as legal theory -- John Austin or Jane Austen? : the province of jurisprudence determined in Pride and prejudice -- Jousting with Bentham : utility, morality and ethics in Ivanhoe's tournament of law -- The monstrous body of the law : Wollstonecraft vs. Shelley -- Hawthorne's haunted house of law : the romance of American legal realism in The house of the seven gables -- In Boz we trust! : Bleak house's (re)imagination of trusteeship -- Two on a guillotine? : courts and 'crits' in A tale of two cities -- Beyond governmentality : the question of justice in Great expectations -- A jurisprudential postscript : century's close and the end of of the meta-narrative of law.

"Novel Judgements is a book about nineteenth century Anglo-American law and literature. But by redefining law as legal theory, Novel judgements departs from 'socio-legal' studies of law and literature, often dated in their focus on past lawyering and court processes. This texts 'theoretical turn' renders the period's 'law-and-literature' relevant to today's readers because the nineteenth century novel, when 'read jurisprudentially', abounds in representations of law's controlling concepts, many of which are still with us today. Rights, justice, law's morality; each are encoded novelistically in stock devices such as the country house, friendship, love, courtship and marriage. In so rendering the public (law) as private (domesticity), these novels expose for legal and literary scholars alike the ways in which law comes to mediate all relationships--individual and collective, personal and political--during the nineteenth century, a period as much under the Rule of Law as the reign of Capital. So these novels pass judgement--a novel judgement--on the extent to which the nineteenth century's idea of law is collusive with that era's Capital, thereby opening up the possibility of a new legal theoretical position: that of a critique of the law and a law of critique"--Provided by publisher.

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