Brooks on Dying Declarations @Princeton

Peter Brooks, Center for Human Values, Princeton University, is publishing Dying Declarations in Fictional Discourse and the Law (Hans J. Lind, ed., New York and London: Routledge, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

In Chavez v. Martinez, where a police officer interrogated a badly wounded—blinded and partially paralyzed—suspect undergoing treatment in the emergency room, Justice Kennedy evoked the ancient doctrine of “dying declarations,” which provides an exception to the exclusion of hearsay evidence in the case of words spoken where “the expectation of almost immediate death will remove all temptation to falsehood.” In a context once marked by the fear of eternal damnation, the brink of death was considered to produce the truth. One can find in the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts—containing confessions from those about to be hung at Tyburn—material that may both confirm and throw some doubt on the unconstrained truth of the dying declaration. But here I am especially concerned with deathbed scenes in the nineteenthcentury novel as moments of the transmission of truth—or sometimes a kind of cosmic lie. My examples are drawn from Balzac, Dickens, Collins, and Conrad.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Baker on Legal Others: The Knowledge of National Community in Nineteeth-Century British Legal Theory and Wilkie Collins's Man and Wife @ArsScripta

Geoffrey Baker, Division of Humanities, Yale-NUS College, Singapore, has published Legal Others: The Knowledge of National Community in Nineteenth-Century British Legal Theory and Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife at 40 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 239 (2018).

Cathrine Frank's Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925 Now Available in Paperback

The paperback edition of Cathrine O. Frank's Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925 (Routledge, 2010) is now available. Here is a description of the book's content from the publisher's website.

Focusing on the last will and testament as a legal, literary, and cultural document, Cathrine O. Frank examines fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras alongside actual wills, legal manuals relating to their creation, case law regarding their administration, and contemporary accounts of curious wills in periodicals. Her study begins with the Wills Act of 1837 and poses two basic questions: What picture of Victorian culture and personal subjectivity emerges from competing legal and literary narratives about the will, and how does the shift from realist to modernist representations of the will accentuate a growing divergence between law and literature? Frank’s examination of works by Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E.M. Forster reveals the shared rhetorical and cultural significance of the will in law and literature while also highlighting the competition between these discourses to structure a social order that emphasized self-determinism yet viewed individuals in relationship to the broader community. Her study contributes to our knowledge of the cultural significance of Victorian wills and creates intellectual bridges between the Victorian and Edwardian periods that will interest scholars from a variety of disciplines who are concerned with the laws, literature, and history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

McAleavey on The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel

ICYMI: Maia McAleavey, Boston College, has published The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015) (Cambridge Studies in Nineteeth-Century Literature and Culture).

Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The courtship plot dominates accounts of the Victorian novel, but this innovative study turns instead to a narrative phenomenon that upends its familiar conventions: the bigamy plot. In hundreds of novels, plays, and poems published in Victorian Great Britain, husbands or wives thought dead suddenly reappear to their newly remarried spouses. In the sensation fiction of Braddon and Collins, these bigamous revelations lead to bribery, arson, and murder, but the same plot operates in the canonical fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. These authors employ bigamy plots to destabilize the apparently conventional form and values of the Victorian novel. By close examination of this plot, including an index of nearly 300 bigamy novels, Maia McAleavey makes the case for a historical approach to narrative, one that is grounded in the legal and social changes of the period but that runs counter to our own formal and cultural expectations.

• The first extended study of the prevalent bigamy plot, filling an important gap in the history of the Victorian novel
• Revises the common view of the Victorian novel that links its narrative structure to courtship and marriage
• Provides an exhaustive appendix of nearly 300 novels featuring a bigamy plot and detailed close readings of familiar and unfamiliar novels