Call For Nominations: 2021 Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in Law, Literature [,] and the Humanities

From Dr. Timothy Peters, ARC DECRA Research Fellow, Senior Lecturer in Law, School of Law and Society, USC:

I am delighted to call for nominations for the 2021 Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in Law, Literature and the Humanities.

 

The prize will be awarded to the author or authors whose book has, in the judgement of the Committee, made the most significant contribution to the field of Australasian law, literature and humanities since the award of the last prize. An additional ECR Prize may also be awarded if the Prize Committee deems that this is warranted.

 

The Prize Rules and Nomination form are attached and more details about the Prize, along with past winners, are available here: https://www.lawlithum.org/penny-pether-prize/

 

Nominations are due to the chair of the Prize Committee, Professor Marco Wan by the 1^st of July 2019 at mwan@hku.hk

[N.B.: There is presumably an error in the submission date, because the prize rules for this year indicate a submission date of July 1st, 2021. --Ed.]

Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australia Awards 2017 Penny Pether Prize to Marco Wan For "Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction" (Routledge, 2017) @routledgebooks

The Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australia has awarded the 2017 Penny Pether Prize to Marco Wan's Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge, 2016). Here's a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

How do lawyers, judges and jurors read novels? And what is at stake when literature and law confront each other in the courtroom? Nineteenth-century England and France are remembered for their active legal prosecution of literature, and this book examines the ways in which five novels were interpreted in the courtroom: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse, Henry Vizetelly’s English translation of Émile Zola’s La Terre, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. It argues that each of these novels attracted legal censure because they presented figures of sexual dissidence – the androgyne, the onanist or masturbator, the patricide, the homosexual and the lesbian – that called into question an increasingly fragile normative, middleclass masculinity. Offering close readings of the novels themselves, and of legal material from the proceedings, such as the trial transcripts and judicial opinions, the book addresses both the doctrinal dimensions of Victorian obscenity and censorship, as well as the reading practices at work in the courtroom. It situates the cases in their historical context, and highlights how each trial constitutes a scene of reading – an encounter between literature and the law – through which different forms of masculinity were shaped, bolstered or challenged.

Each year the Association awards the prize "to the author or authors whose book, in the judgment of the Committee, made the most significant contribution to the field of law, literature and humanities in Australasia."