Liminal Discourses

The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods.

1;Introduction 1: The Sublime of Law;7 2;Introduction 2: On the Threshold and Beyond: An introductory Observation;21 3;Representing Law: Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind;33 4;Bare Law Between Two Lives: Jose Saramago and Cornelia Vismann on Naming, Filing and Cancelling;43 5;Liminal Tensions in Public to Private Conceptions of Justice: Nussbaum, Woolf and the Struggle for identity;59 6;Under the Force of the Law: Communal imagination and the Constitutional Sublime in Walter Scotts The Bride of Lammermoor;79 7;Moll Flanders, Ordinarys Accounts and Old Bailey Proceedings;101 8;Ariel and Caliban as Law-conscious Servants Longing for Legal Personhood;119 9;Altered Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Reconstructing the Subject in Fay Weldons The Cloning of Joanna May;135 10;The Business of Law and Literature: to Compose an Order, to imagine Man;155 11;Renaissance into Postmodernism: Anticipations of Legal Unrest;183