Abstract
In his investigations of the hermeneutic interdependence of literature and the law, Robert Cover observes how literature initiates, and contains the stories of, historical change. Cultural transformations occur, he explains, when hegemonic forces encounter alternative narratives that act against the “universalist virtues” that inhere in dominant precepts.1 All such movements take place in a nomos, a “world of law” that is comprised of “a system of tension between reality and vision”.2 The role of literature is to negotiate this tension between what is, what should be, and what might be, and it does so by revealing the realities of material conditions and placing them against visions of alternate possibilities. Literature acts as a catalyst for change and absorbs into its narrative codes the adjustments of historical development.
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Notes
Mark Philp, “Introduction” to The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–17.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 144.
Ian Balfour, “Promises, Promises: Social and Other Contracts in the English Jacobins (Godwin/Inchbald)”, in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 225.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, vol. 3 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993), 83.
Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 16–26. See also, Godwin, Political Justice, 72–80.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 20.
See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 57–88.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, vol. 1 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 83. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text.
See Gary Kelly, “Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6 (July 1994):369–88.
McKeon, 51–52; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 42–49.
Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (London: Printed for G.G. & J. Robinson, 1796; London: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text.
Thomas Holcroft, The Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (London: Longman, Hurt, Rees, and Orme, 1805), iii.
J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 225–47.
James Boyd White, Justice as Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ix.
See Holcroft’s review of Eliza Kirkam Mathews, The Count de Hoensdern; a German tale, 2 vols. (Dublin: Wogan, et al., 1793) in The Monthly Review, 2d ser., 12 (November 1793):338.
Martha Minow, “Partial Justice: Law and Minorities”, in The Fate of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 15–77.
Robin West, Narrative, Authority and Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 20–23.
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1–2. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text.
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 77–78. For Lukács the inner form of the novel is about the journeying of the problematic individual and the outward form is “biography”.
See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining A Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 1.
For a conservative example, see Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (London: G.G. andj. Robinson, 1800).
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 124–25.
Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 136.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3.
Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolutions (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 1, 3.
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Parti, in Thomas Paine: Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 77.
Quoted in C.K. Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1932), xvii.
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© 2004 Nancy E. Johnson
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Johnson, N.E. (2004). Narrativizing a Critique of the Contract. In: The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503380_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503380_2
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