Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries

A new framework for examining the relationship between individual and cultural trauma, literary texts and common law.

• Performs transformative interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period
• Uncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itself
• Draws on three case studies – adultery, child criminality and rape testimony – to demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the 18th and 19th centuries

Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary ‘construction’ of childhood by 19th-century fairy tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.

Readings include:

Charles Brockden Brown's 'Wieland and Ormond'

Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles'

Charles Kingsley's 'The Water-Babies'

George MacDonald's 'The Lost Princess'

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King'

Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre'

Henry Fielding's 'The Modern Husband'

Sir Walter Scott's 'Heart of Midlothian'

Samuel Richardson's 'Clarissa'