A Collection on Fatal Fictions: A New Book on Law and Criminal Literature from Oxford University Press @OxUniPress

The Law Library has sent me up a copy of the new publication Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigations in Law and Literature (Alison L. LaCroix, Richard H. McAdams, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Oxford University Press, 2017). It includes an introduction by Scott Turow.  Link to the Table of Contents here.


Here's a description of the book's contents, courtesy of the publisher's website.

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure.

 This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain.

The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.

ICYMI: Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature (OUP, 2017) @OxUniPress

ICYMI: Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature (Alison L. LaCroix, Richard H. McAdams, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Oxford University Press, 2017).\ Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.

Chapter 1. Scott Turow, On My Careers in Crime

Part I: Criminal Histories
Chapter 2. Daniel Telech, Mercy at the Areopagus: A Nietzschean account of Justice and Joy in the Eumenides
Chapter 3. Barry Wimpfheimer, Suborning Perjury: A Case Study of Narrative Precedent in Talmudic Law
Chapter 4. Alison LaCroix, A Man for All Treasons: Crimes By and Against the Tudor State in the Novels of Hilary Mantel
Chapter 5. Marina Leslie, Representing Anne Green: Historical and Literary Form, And the Scenes of the Crime in Oxford, 1651
Chapter 6. Richard Strier & Richard McAdams, Cold-Blooded and High Minded Murder: The Chapter 7. Pamela Foa, What's Love Got To Do With It? Sexual Exploitation in Measure for Measure: A Prosecutor's View


Part II: Race and Crime 
Chapter 8. Justin Driver, Justice Thomas and Bigger Thomas
Chapter 9. Martha Nussbaum, Reconciliation Without Anger: Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country

Part III: Responsibility and Violence 
Chapter 10. Saul Levmore, Kidnap, Credibility, and The Collector.
Chapter 11. Jonathan Masur, Premeditation and Responsibility in The Stranger
Chapter 12. Saira Mohamed and Melissa Murray, Walking Away: Lessons from Omelas
Chapter 13. Mark Payne, Before the Law: Imagining Crimes against Trees

Part IV: Suspicion and Investigation 
Chapter 14. Caleb Smith, Crime Scenes: Fictions of Security in the Antebellum American Borderlands 
Chapter 15. Steven Wilf, The Legal Historian as Detective 

Index

Creating the State, Defining Treason

Alison L. LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, has published A Man for All Treasons: Crimes by and Against the Tudor State in the Novels of Hilary Mantel in Fatal Fictions: Crime in Law and Literature (Martha C. Nussbau, Richard H. McAdams and Alison L. LaCroix, eds.; forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This essay, written for a forthcoming volume titled Fatal Fictions: Crime in Law and Literature (Martha Nussbaum, Richard McAdams & Alison LaCroix, eds.), examines the crime of treason as depicted in Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012). In the novels, Mantel provides a corrective to the enduringly popular view of Thomas Cromwell as at best a Tudor-era fixer, and at worst as a murderer and torturer – a view made famous by Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (1960). Instead, Mantel’s Cromwell is the industrious creator of the modern administrative state. In this characterization, Mantel follows in the scholarly path of Geoffrey Elton, whose Tudor Revolution in Government (1953) rehabilitated Cromwell by arguing that he reformed English government by replacing personal rule with modern bureaucracy and systematizing the royal finances. In different ways, both Mantel’s and Elton’s account rebut the image of Cromwell as a criminal. But I argue that Mantel’s Cromwell in fact should be seen as representing two species of crime: crimes against the state, in the form of treason; and crimes by the state, in the form of espionage and torture. The novels present both forms of crime as occurring at the same historical moment in which the modern state was being formed. Because crimes against the state and by the state both presuppose the existence of the state itself, Mantel’s and Elton’s modernizing Cromwell may not be as distinct from Bolt’s devious Cromwell as the competing accounts would suggest.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.