Description
Book SynopsisExamines ideas about the nature of law as reflected in literary and political writing before, during, and after the American Civil War. This work traces the evolution of antislavery thought from its pre-war opposition to the constitutional order of the young nation to its elevation of the US Constitution as an expression of the ideal of justice.
Trade ReviewA dense, important, and thought-provoking book. -- Michael Kent Curtis Civil War Book Review 2007 Pays good attention to genre, aesthetics, and language, offering compelling and original interpretations that make significant contributions. -- Maurice S. Lee New England Quarterly 2007 Intriguing. -- Daniel A. Farber American Historical Review 2007 Victory of Law is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on the interanimation of nineteenth-century American law and literature prompted by the slavery crisis. -- Jeannine Marie DeLombard Modern Philology 2009
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
1. Victory of Law: Melville and Reconstruction
2. Shadows of Law: Somerset and the Literature of Abolition
3. Constitutional Disobedience: Thoreau, Sumner, and the Transcendental Law of the 1850s
4. Legal Sentences: Hawthorne's Sovereign Performatives and Hermeneutics of Freedom
5. John Bingham's Poetic Constitution
Notes
Index
