New Books On Law and the Humanities From DeGruyter

New books available from DeGruyter:

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen has edited Law and Justice in Literature, Film and Theatre: Nordic Perspectives (Law & Literature; 5). 

Aims and Scope

This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic artworks. Law and justice have always been important issues in Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas through Ludvig Holberg and Henrik Ibsen to Lars Noréns theatre and Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today. This book strives to answer two fundamental questions: Is there a special Nordic justice? And what does the legal and literary/aesthetic culture of the North mean for the concept of law and justice and for the understanding of the interdisciplinary exchange of law and humanities? The concept of law and literature as a research area was originally developed in countries of common law. This book investigates law and humanities from a different legal tradition, and contributes thus both to the discussion of the general and the comparative studies of law and humanities.

Table of Contents

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

Preface 1

Ian Ward

Crossing Borders 5

Ditlev Tamm

Law and Literature in a Nordic Legal Perspective 11

Hans Hauge

Nordic Sameness and Difference 25

Peter Garde

“With Laws Shall Our Land Be Built Up”.

The Law in the Sagas – Ideal and Failure 45

Toomas Kotkas

Two Conceptions of Justice in the Kalevala: A Nietzschean Reading 63

Arild Linneberg

From Natural Law To The Nature Of Laws: Ludvig Holberg 77

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

The Confession of a Judge.

On Narrative Desire and Law in Steen Steensen Blicher’s Early Crime Story

“the Pastor of Vejlbye” 85

Bjarne Markussen

Contesting Narratives: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Trygve Allister

Diesen’s Hold My Heart 103

Ari Hirvonen

The Subject of the Law 119

Helle Porsdam

From ‘Law and Literature’ to ‘Law and Humanities’: Transatlantic Dialogues

on Film – the Case of Lars von Trier 149

vi Contents

List of contributors 167

Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer have edited Liminal Discourses: Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature (Law & Literature; 6).

Aims and Scope

The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods.

Table of Contents

Daniela Carpi

Introduction 1: The Sublime of Law fi 1

Jeanne Gaakeer

Introduction 2: On the Threshold and Beyond:

An Introductory Observation fi 15

Cristina Costantini

Representing Law: Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the

Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind fi 27

Maria Aristodemou

Bare Law Between Two Lives: José Saramago and Cornelia Vismann on Naming,

Filing and Cancelling fi 37

Melanie Williams

Liminal Tensions in Public to Private Conceptions of Justice: Nussbaum, Woolf

and the Struggle for Identity fi 53

Julián Jiménez Heffernan

“Under the Force of the Law”: Communal Imagination and the Constitutional

Sublime in Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor fi 73

Jeanne Clegg

Moll Flanders,Ordinary’s Accounts and Old Bailey Proceedings fi 95

Sidia Fiorato

Ariel and Caliban as Law-conscious Servants Longing for Legal

Personhood fi 113

Laura Apostoli

Altered Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Reconstructing the Subject in Fay Weldon’s

The Cloning of Joanna May fi 129

Jeanne Gaakeer

The Business of Law and Literature: to Compose an Order, to Imagine

Man fi 149

Daniela Carpi

Renaissance into Postmodernism: Anticipations of Legal Unrest fi 177