Announcement of a new publishing initiative:
Laws | Literatures | Cultures
Austin D. sArAt series editor
Editorial Advisory Board:
Peter Brooks Princeton
University
susAn sAge HeinzelmAn University of Texas at Austin
BernADette meyler Stanford University
rAvit reicHmAn Brown University
eric slAuter University of Chicago
The crossroads of legal scholarship and literary criticism
has, over more than forty years of writing and research, become a busy intellectual intersection. As a ground of
inquiry, law and literature has transformed from a novel set of proposals to a mature field of study and writing,
with well-established perspectives and positions, courses offered for both undergraduates and law students,
and the emergence of its own journals. Writers who have shaped the field include legal and political theorists, jurists, literary
scholars, ethnographers, and historians.
Despite these accomplishments it remains
the case, as Kenji Yoshino observed nearly ten years ago, that “law and literature has been caught in limbo for a particularly long time.”1 The early division in the field between law- in-literature and law-as-literature has been exhaustively explored. The time is ripe for the encouragement and
development of new approaches
in the field, pathways offering the possibility of greater insights and new analyses
of challenges confronting societies in a variety of cultures and legal orders.
Laws, Literatures, and Cultures,
a new series supported
by the Amherst College Press, will provide a forum for this work. As a digital-first, open-access scholarly publisher, the Amherst College Press offers scholars working at the intersections of these
questions new tools for supporting research and publishing—and the potential of greatly increased
impact through immediate
and unfettered access to titles we produce.
In our new series, we are seeking
work that will set law, literature, and culture in new dialogues, exploring the textual dimensions and cultural work of
law and the legal frameworks of literature. Law and literature have for millennia
been closely allied, as means of
persuasion and the creation of cultural norms. Seting law and literature in juxtaposition permits a mapping from one to the other that often produces startling
and important results.
In addition, we seek work that draws literary, legal, and/or cultural analysis
together in the serviced of exploring and understanding specific
social and political
problems and that attends
carefully to the exploration of history.
We also seek work expanding the consideration of these
questions to cultural settings, literary
traditions, and legal systems outside the common law. Of particular interest are works that define and argue a thesis drawing on both textual and non-textual sources for which a multimodal, digital presentation offers unique expressive power.
Laws, Literatures, and Cultures will entertain proposals
for works of all forms, from longer, traditional monograph- length studies to collections of shorter works. We are open as well to projects
with no clear parallel in the print tradition. In the case of all our works we will subject
submissions to a rigorous
process of peer review and evaluation.. Upon release, works will be supported by the Press’s commitment to creating
pathways to annotation and comment from the community of scholars and students engaging with our work. While developed in the first instance
as web-based and downloadable digital works, books in the series will also be prepared
and released as printed works through a print-on-demand pathway.
1 Kenji
Yoshino, “The City and the Poet,” Yale Law Journal 114 (2005), 1837.
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