Exception Taken: Examining Injustice In Early Modern English Literature

New from University of Toronto Press: Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature (Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, 2015).

Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions. From canonical poems and plays to crime pamphlets and educational treatises, the essays engage with the relevance and wide appeal of legal questions in order to understand how literature operated in the early modern period.

Justice in its many forms – legal, poetic, divine, natural, and customary – is examined through insightful and innovative analyses of a number of texts, including The Merchant of Venice, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. A major contribution to the growing field of law and literature, this collection offers cultural contexts, interpretive insights, and formal implications for the entire field of English Renaissance culture.

Donald Beecher is Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.
Travis DeCook is Associate Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.
Andrew Wallace is Associate Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.
Grant Williams is Associate Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.

Copy provided by Chris Reed, publicist, University of Toronto Press.

The book includes the following essays:

Grant Williams, Law and the Production of Literature: An Introductory Perspective

Bradin Cormack, Paper Justice, Parchment Justice: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and the Life of Legal Documents

Tim Stretton, Conditional Promises and Legal Instruments in the Merchant of Venice

Virginia Lee Strain, The "Snared Subject" and the General Pardon Statute in Late Elizabethan Coterie Literature

Debora Shuger, The Prison Diaries of Archbishop Laud

David Stymeist, Criminal Biography in Early Modern News Pamphlets

Barbara Kreps, Two-Sided Legal Narratives: Slander, Evidence, Proof, and Turnarounds in Much Ado About Nothing

Elizabeth Hanson, No Boy Left Behind: Education and Distributive Justice in Early Modern England

Judith Owerns, Warding Off Injustice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene

John D. Staines, Torture and the Tyrant's Injustice from Foxe to King Lear

Elliott Visconsi, The Literatures of Toleration and Civil Religion in Post-Revolutionary England

Paul Stevens, Obnoxious Satan: Milton, Neo-Roman Justice, and the Burden of Grace


 

Cloth

ISBN 9781442642010

Published Jan 2015

$70.00