Oseid on What Lawyers Can Learn From Edgar Allan Poe @USTLawMN

Julie A. Oseid, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Law School, has published What Lawyers Can Learn from Edgar Allan Poe at 15 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: JAWLD 233 (2018). Here is the abstract.

Treat yourself to a spine-tingling Edgar Allan Poe sensation by reading about the synergy between stories of horror and legal writing. Poe defined a short-story writing technique and named four qualities — brevity, unity, focus, and brilliant style — as critical. These exact same qualities are familiar to lawyers because they are just as critical for persuasive briefs. This article examines Poe’s critique of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, reviews some of Poe’s own work, and applies Poe’s advice about great short-story writing to legal writing.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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.

Motherhood, the "Fallen Woman," and Popular Culture

Janet Mason Ellerby is publishing Embroidering the Scarlet A: Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film (University of Michigan, 2015). Here's a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates “out-of-wedlock” motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity.

As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.

Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates “out-of-wedlock” motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity.

As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.

“Janet Ellerby brings an unusual and highly valuable voice to the field of American literary studies as she surveys representations of ‘fallen’women, birthmothers, and their illegitimate children in American fiction and film, as seen from a birthmother’s point of view. The author’s personal approach–her identification with the characters and their situations–makes for lively, fascinating, and distinctive readings…. a significant, pathbreaking book.”
— Margaret Homans, Yale University, author of The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility

Illustration : “Hester Prynne & Pearl before the stocks” by Mary Hallock Foote from The Scarlet Letter, James R. Osgood & Co, 1878.

Janet Mason Ellerby is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Product Details

• 6 x 9.
• 290pp.
• 
  

Available for sale worldwide

---

• Hardcover
• 2015
• Available

• 978-0-472-07263-7

• $85.00 U.S.

---

• Paper
• 2015
• Available

• 978-0-472-05263-9

• $34.50 U.S.

---

Related Products

• Embroidering the Scarlet A
• Ebook
• 978-0-472-12105-2
• View Options

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Keywords

• Unwed mother, birthmother, Birth Mother, Illegitimacy, The Scarlet Letter, Adoption, American literature, Feminist critique, American culture, American film, Fallen woman, Out-of-wedlock motherhood

---

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Stay connected

• 
• 
• 
• 

- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/6944967/embroidering_the_scarlet_a#sthash.z922XZdh.dpuf

Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates “out-of-wedlock” motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity.

As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.

“Janet Ellerby brings an unusual and highly valuable voice to the field of American literary studies as she surveys representations of ‘fallen’women, birthmothers, and their illegitimate children in American fiction and film, as seen from a birthmother’s point of view. The author’s personal approach–her identification with the characters and their situations–makes for lively, fascinating, and distinctive readings…. a significant, pathbreaking book.”
— Margaret Homans, Yale University, author of The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility

Illustration : “Hester Prynne & Pearl before the stocks” by Mary Hallock Foote from The Scarlet Letter, James R. Osgood & Co, 1878.

Janet Mason Ellerby is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Product Details

• 6 x 9.
• 290pp.
• 
  

Available for sale worldwide

---

• Hardcover
• 2015
• Available

• 978-0-472-07263-7

• $85.00 U.S.

---

• Paper
• 2015
• Available

• 978-0-472-05263-9

• $34.50 U.S.

---

Related Products

• Embroidering the Scarlet A
• Ebook
• 978-0-472-12105-2
• View Options

---

nothing

Keywords

• Unwed mother, birthmother, Birth Mother, Illegitimacy, The Scarlet Letter, Adoption, American literature, Feminist critique, American culture, American film, Fallen woman, Out-of-wedlock motherhood

---

nothing

nothing

Stay connected

• 
• 
• 
• 

- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/6944967/embroidering_the_scarlet_a#sthash.z922XZdh.dpuf

Enlarge jacket/cover

Google Search Inside

Subjects

• Literary Studies - American Literature
• Media and Communication
• Gender Studies - Women's Studies
• Psychology

BISAC Categories

• Social Science - Women's Studies
• Literary Collections - American/General

Embroidering the Scarlet A

Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film

Janet Mason Ellerby

The first book-length study of changing cultural representations of unwed mothers in American fiction and film, from The Scarlet Letter to Juno

---

Description

Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates “out-of-wedlock” motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity.

As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.

“Janet Ellerby brings an unusual and highly valuable voice to the field of American literary studies as she surveys representations of ‘fallen’women, birthmothers, and their illegitimate children in American fiction and film, as seen from a birthmother’s point of view. The author’s personal approach–her identification with the characters and their situations–makes for lively, fascinating, and distinctive readings…. a significant, pathbreaking book.”
— Margaret Homans, Yale University, author of The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility

- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/6944967/embroidering_the_scarlet_a#sthash.z922XZdh.dpuf

Enlarge jacket/cover

Google Search Inside

Subjects

• Literary Studies - American Literature
• Media and Communication
• Gender Studies - Women's Studies
• Psychology

BISAC Categories

• Social Science - Women's Studies
• Literary Collections - American/General

Embroidering the Scarlet A

Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film

Janet Mason Ellerby

The first book-length study of changing cultural representations of unwed mothers in American fiction and film, from The Scarlet Letter to Juno

---

Description

Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates “out-of-wedlock” motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity.

As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.

“Janet Ellerby brings an unusual and highly valuable voice to the field of American literary studies as she surveys representations of ‘fallen’women, birthmothers, and their illegitimate children in American fiction and film, as seen from a birthmother’s point of view. The author’s personal approach–her identification with the characters and their situations–makes for lively, fascinating, and distinctive readings…. a significant, pathbreaking book.”
— Margaret Homans, Yale University, author of The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility

- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/6944967/embroidering_the_scarlet_a#sthash.z922XZdh.dpuf

Enlarge jacket/cover

Google Search Inside

Subjects

• Literary Studies - American Literature
• Media and Communication
• Gender Studies - Women's Studies
• Psychology

BISAC Categories

• Social Science - Women's Studies
• Literary Collections - American/General

Embroidering the Scarlet A

Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film

Janet Mason Ellerby

The first book-length study of changing cultural representations of unwed mothers in American fiction and film, from The Scarlet Letter to Juno

---

Description

Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the “fallen woman” from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates “out-of-wedlock” motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity.

As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.

“Janet Ellerby brings an unusual and highly valuable voice to the field of American literary studies as she surveys representations of ‘fallen’women, birthmothers, and their illegitimate children in American fiction and film, as seen from a birthmother’s point of view. The author’s personal approach–her identification with the characters and their situations–makes for lively, fascinating, and distinctive readings…. a significant, pathbreaking book.”
— Margaret Homans, Yale University, author of The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility

- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/6944967/embroidering_the_scarlet_a#sthash.z922XZdh.dpuf

Enlarge jacket/cover

Google Search Inside

Subjects

• Literary Studies - American Literature
• Media and Communication
• Gender Studies - Women's Studies
• Psychology

BISAC Categories

• Social Science - Women's Studies
• Literary Collections - American/General

Embroidering the Scarlet A

Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film

Janet Mason Ellerby

- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/6944967/embroidering_the_scarlet_a#sthash.z922XZdh.dpuf

Embroidering the Scarlet A

Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film

Janet Mason Ellerby

- See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/6944967/embroidering_the_scarlet_a#sthash.z922XZdh.dpuf