Advice About "Consent," a New Play by Nina Raine

From the Guardian: a review of a production of Nina Raine's Consent, a play about a rape surviver and the personal and professional lives of the barristers involved in the case. More here. 

Says reviewer Michael Billington in part, "Consent is a play that stimulates debate rather than stifles it. ...This is a very good play that reminds us that drama, like the law, depends on antithetical narratives in which we become judge and jury."

More here from the Independent, the Evening Standard. 

A 1930s Alabama Rape Trial and "To Kill a Mockingbird"

A newly published book makes the case (pun intended) for a link between a real life trial and Harper Lee's famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Joseph Madison Beck's My Father and Atticus Finch (Norton, 2016) retells the story of a 1930s  Alabama rape trial in which Mr. Beck's father defended a black man against rape charges. It also explores pre-civil rights era race relations in the South, and the image of Southern lawyers.


Additional information, including an interview with the author, here.  Via Allen Mendenhall @allenmendenhall.

Reading Rape in Literature and Law

An old but still relevant essay: Michael Wood discusses rape in literature in this review for the London Review of Books (subscription required). Books he considers:

Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation (Oxford 1982)
Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Oxford, 1982)
Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton University Press, 1982).

A selected bibliography on the subject below.


Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation (Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Bridgely Thomson, eds.; Routledge, 2010).

Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (D. S. Brewer, 2001).

Sabine Sielke, Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990 (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Kathleen Wall, The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988).