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writing and reputation in Victorian law and literature
Why would Hawthorne and Eliot grant their fallen women an anachronistic right to silence that could only worsen their punishment? Why did Bronte and Gaskell find gossip such a useful source of information when lawyers excluded it as hearsay? How did Trollope's work as an editor influence his preoccupation throughout his novels with libel? Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, Victorian periodical literature, legislative debate, case law and legal treatise, Cathrine O. Frank traces the ways conventions of literary characterization mingled with character-centered legal developments to produce a jurisprudential theory of character that extends beyond the legal profession. She explores how key categories and representational strategies for imagining individual personhood also defined communities and mediated relations within them, in life and in fiction.
Introduction: Character-building: narrative theory, narrative jurisprudence, and the idea of character -- Incriminating character: revisiting the right to silence in Adam Bede and The scarlet letter -- Gossip, hearsay, and the characte exception: reputation on trial in The tenant of Wildfell Hall and R v Rowton -- Defamation of characterz; Anthony Trollope and the law of libel -- Dignity, disclosure, and the right of privacy: the strange characters of Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Greay -- The English Dreyfus Case: status as character in the illiberal age.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [225]-237) and index.
Edinburgh critical studies in law, literature and the humanities