In the twenty-first century, as in the sixteenth, a blindfolded woman holding a sword and scales personifies justice; her blindfold conveys impartiality, her scales evenhandedness, and her sword the authority to compel obedience. In pre-democratic early modern England, Justice’s iconography was often used to legitimate the pain that the state imposed on those who broke the common peace. Simultaneously, the creative and cultural narratives within which the penal code was embedded often complicated and contradicted the state’s legally violent precepts. The relationship between legal violence and justice is at the center of this project: Must the law be violent to control violence? Does the law’s violence promote justice or disrupt it? How do the formal mechanisms of law and social control operate within the complex world of art, sermons, and literature? This project maps the late Elizabethan and early Stuart engagement with those questions. I examine a continuum of responses to legal violence embedded in the judicial institutions of Parliament, the Star Chamber, and the Queen’s Bench as well as in poetry, plays, sermons, broadsides, iconography, utopian narratives, paintings, and engravings. Often drawing on the metaphoric force of Justice’s symbols, the early modern response to legal violence was not purely semantic but strongly aesthetic, defending, mediating, reflecting, and refracting the state’s formal mechanisms of law. Reading case law along with works by Thomas More, Elizabeth I, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Edward Coke, John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish, I trace law as a cultural practice, expressed and understood aesthetically through both codified and creative means.

This dissertation will apply the structure of a legal trial’s procedures to two Modernist novels: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). These novels position themselves as renderings of legal proceedings, the written memoriam of metaphorical trials conducted by first person narrators who alternatively and simultaneously function as Plaintiff’s counsel, Defense Counsel and finally as witnesses to the events of the story. All of these personae reveal evidence and testimony presented in the forum of a trial of the central characters who recollect legal events and whose narrations develop moral questions. Thus these narrations are the court record, from which there is no appeal, culminating in not only persuasive arguments about guilt and innocence of the central characters, but also demanding that a verdict or moral judgment be rendered by the reader of these behaviors and values of the individuals as well as the societies which these authors critique in their novels. Ford Madox Ford in The Good Soldier (1915) and Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita (1955) create fictional artifacts which instill impressions of human life and present specific revelations of human nature in their art. Their narratives explain certain events in a temporal order, which communicate to readers a fictional world, its participants, and especially their emotions. These particular novels are early and late examples of Modernism, and are very different from one another, yet both illustrate the characteristics that so clearly define the Modern novel: art’s ability to engage not just the mind but the senses; the reader does not just read, but rather becomes immersed in the feelings of the characters in the story. The reader feels the dynamics between the characters through the narrative presentation as closely as possible to his or her being actually present in the fictionally created world of the novel. Both novels present their stories in a thrice-told frame that allows the character/narrators to explore epistemology and justifications for their acts or inaction. These stories are recollections, so that each character/narrator is remembering his respective narrative after the facts; these novels are unique for this timing.

"Matters of State: American Literature in the Civil Rights Era" argues that American writers engaged with the American civil rights movement as it unfolded by turning their attention to the state and the state's relationship to its subjects and by imagining new forms for both. Postwar American literary culture, then, understood racial inequality not solely as a problem of identity and difference, nor simply as an economic problem, but as a problem of formal citizenship. Between around 1948 and around 1968, that problem as such spurred diverse and unruly literary inquiries into a range of matters of state, each taken up in dialogue with American constitutional law and each also a meditation on the particular capacities of literary art as a site for political thinking. William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor tried to reimagine the structure of federalism; James Baldwin and Harper Lee interrogated the real workings of democracy; Chester Himes and Sam Greenlee asked whether social movements ought to collaborate with the existing U.S. state in the first place; Norman Mailer, William Styron, Amiri Baraka, and others reoriented literary culture toward a new, post-civil-rights set of questions. Read as one archive, the novels and plays and essays that they produced tell a new story about American literature at midcentury: a story about literature's quasi-autonomous engagement with the political-theoretical questions that racial inequality had rendered urgent. They remind us of the complexity of history itself, and of the difficulty and uncertainty obscured by triumphalist narratives of democratic liberalism's inevitable civil-rights redemption. And they afford a glimpse into the kaleidoscopic legal worldmaking for which literary art in general can be an arena.

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Mannheim, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-166).

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Mannheim, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-166).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1963. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 346-352).

Thesis (Ph. D. in English)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2007. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, August, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Participants in the critical enterprise of “Law and Literature” tend to center their arguments on the question of literature’s utility to the study and practice of law. I focus instead on the reciprocal corollary: how can an understanding of law influence a critical reading of literature? Taking cues from discussions in Renaissance studies of law and literature and drawing on my own legal training, I assert that transatlantic literary studies provides both a conceptual framework for positing a reciprocal relationship between law and literature and, in nineteenth century Scottish and American depictions of property and criminal law, a crucial test case for this exploration by uncovering new “legal fictions” within these texts. I begin my first chapter by situating my work within recent critical work in Law and Literature. While most scholarship in the “law in literature” subcategory since James Boyd White’s influential 1973 text The Legal Imagination has focused on how (and if) literary studies can help current and future legal practitioners through what Maria Aristodemou calls “instrumental” and “humanistic” mechanisms, recent work, particularly by a dedicated group of interdisciplinary scholars in Renaissance studies, has focused on the law’s benefit to literary studies in this field. I explore the critical mechanisms employed by these scholars as well as by scholars in nineteenth century literary studies such as Ian Ward. I then turn to transatlantic literary studies, arguing that the approaches outlined by Susan Manning, Joselyn Almeida, and others provide a framework that can give nineteenth-century literary studies a similar framework to that proposed by Aristodemou: an “instrumental” method of giving greater precision to discussions of how historical institutions and hierarchies are depicted in nineteenth century literature, and a “humanistic” method of extending beyond historicist approaches to see beyond the often artificial demarcations of literary period and genre by finding commonalities that transcend disciplinary and historical borders. I conclude this introduction by identifying the legal and literary parameters of my project in the legal-political tensions of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Scotland and America. My second chapter focuses on property law and the question of inheritance, reading Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and The Bride of Lammermoor alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to demonstrate how the narratives play with two dueling theories of inheritance law – meritocratic and feudal – and how those dueling legal theories impact the events of the tales themselves. After outlining tensions between older but still prevalent ideas of feudal succession and newer but admittedly flawed in execution notions of meritocratic land transfer, I explore how Scott’s and Hawthorne’s narratives demonstrate the inability of their characters to reconcile these notions. Both Rob Roy and The House of the Seven Gables seem to demonstrate the triumph of deserving but legally alienated protagonists over their titled foes; both novels, however, end with the reconciliation of all parties through ostensibly love-based weddings that perform the legal function of uniting competing land claims, thus providing a suspiciously easy resolution to the legal conflict at the heart of both stories. While reconciliation makes the legal controversies at the heart of these stories ultimately irrelevant, the legal nihilism of The Bride of Lammermoor takes the opposite tactic, demonstrating both the individual shortcomings of the Ashton and Ravenswood families and the systemic failure of Scottish property law’s feudalism to achieve equitable outcomes. I next turn to the question of insanity in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and James Hogg’s “Strange Letter of a Lunatic,” arguing that both narratives complicate the legal definition of insanity by showing gaps between the legislative formulation and actual application to their fictional defendants. After developing the different viewpoints towards criminal culpability articulated by the American (but based on English law) and Scottish versions of the insanity defense, I turn first to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s narrator, I argue, deliberately develops a narrative that takes him outside the protections of the insanity defense, insisting on his own culpability despite – or perhaps because of – the implications for his own punishment. Meanwhile, Hogg’s narrative, both in its original draft form for Blackwood’s and its published version in Fraser’s, paints a different picture of a narrator who avoids criminal punishment but finds himself confined in asylum custody. These two areas of inheritance and insanity collide in my exploration of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frank Norris’s McTeague, where I illustrate the relationship between the urban demographics and zoning laws of both the real and fictional versions of London and San Francisco and the title characters’ mentally ill but probably not legally insane murderers. After demonstrating Stevenson’s and Norris’s link between psychology and the complex amalgamations of their fictional cityscapes, I demonstrate how these cityscapes also allow them to sidestep rather than embrace mental illness as an excuse for their murderous protagonists’ crimes, indicting the institutions at the center of their texts as equally divided and flawed.

Submitted by Ana Valéria de Jesus Moura (anavaleria_131@hotmail.com) on 2018-01-16T19:01:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DANIEL NICORY DO PRADO.pdf: 1026729 bytes, checksum: 76688c9b2086ace57e533faf769e73cc (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ana Valéria de Jesus Moura (anavaleria_131@hotmail.com) on 2018-01-16T19:02:03Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DANIEL NICORY DO PRADO.pdf: 1026729 bytes, checksum: 76688c9b2086ace57e533faf769e73cc (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-01-16T19:02:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DANIEL NICORY DO PRADO.pdf: 1026729 bytes, checksum: 76688c9b2086ace57e533faf769e73cc (MD5) / O presente trabalho teve o objetivo de discutir a constituição do universo e a definição dos critérios de verdade da narrativa judicial. Adotando como marcos teórico filosofia aristotélica e as decorrentes reflexões sobre tempo e narrativa de Paul Ricouer e sobre ação comunicativa de Jürgen Habermas, iniciou-se uma revisão das teorias da ação, de base teleológica, da filosofia, as suas consequências para a construção da teoria do fato na ciência jurídica, e a passagem da ação à narração por meio da teoria dos atos de fala. Chegando à questão da narrativa, analisaram-se, a partir de Paul Ricouer, suas principais modalidades, a narrativa histórica e a ficção, sendo que a primeira apresenta uma pretensão de correspondência, verificada pelas provas fornecidas pelo historiador, e a segunda uma pretensão de credibilidade, verificada pela coerência narrativa. À primeira vista, a narrativa judicial seria enquadrada como forma de narrativa histórica, em face da evidente relação entre verdade-correspondência e justiça. No entanto, existem vários indicadores no sistema e na prática jurídica de que nem sempre se alcança a correspondência, mesmo quando não se trata de um problema de insuficiência cognitiva, mas de proibição jurídica de acesso aos elementos disponíveis. Isto é justificado, em parte, porque o processo judicial teria outros valores a preservar além da verdade, mas poderia também ser dito o contrário, que, nesses casos, de renúncia à correspondência, outro tipo de pretensão de validade (como a correção normativa ou o consenso) prevalece sobre a busca da correspondência. Portanto, pode-se concluir que a narrativa judicial é ficcional, mas, como a correspondência não pode ser completamente abandonada, trata-se de ficção baseada em fatos reais. A estrutura da narrativa judicial é binária, dividida em história do processo, narrada no modo mimético alto, dentro da qual se revela gradualmente a história do conflito, narrada nos modos mimético baixo ou irônico, em que o desfecho da primeira é simultaneamente o da segunda. Quanto ao narrador, a pluralidade de pontos de vista narrativos é a principal característica, e decorre do próprio sistema (princípio do contraditório) destinando-se a gerar uma incerteza provisória quanto à verdade, a ser superada com a decisão definitiva. O reconhecimento de que cada processo judicial é um pequeno universo ficcional tem por consequência a adoção da coerência, e não da correspondência, como critério de verdPoade. Por ser ficção baseada em fatos reais, a correspondência não é completamente abandonada, já que a coerência pode ser enganosa. A coerência externa pode gerar equívocos quando remete a uma narrativa familiar, no âmbito da tradição, mas que não reflete corretamente o caso em discussão; a coerência interna pode gerar equívocos quando há falso consenso entre as partes, ou não oposição deliberada de uma delas; quando uma narrativa é coerente por um critério e incoerente por outro, a correção do equívoco deve partir da verificação desta divergência até a decisão por um dos critérios; se uma narrativa é duplamente coerente, mas falsa, ou duplamente incoerente, mas verdadeira, os recursos narrativos disponíveis são insuficientes para a correção do problema. / This work intended to discuss how the universe of judicial narrative is constructed and which are its criteria of truth. Adopting Aristotle’s philosophy, and its further developments of the relations between time and narrative, by Paul Ricouer, and of communicative action, by Jürgen Habermas, as the main theoretical framework, it starts reviewing the teleological concept of action, its many philosophical theories, their consequences to the construction of fact as a legal concept, and then its further passage to the narrative theory using the theory of speech acts as a theoretical transition. Regarding narrative theory, Paul Ricouer’s work was used to distinguish the main narrative forms (historical and fictional), according to whom the first has a correspondence claim, verified by the evidence provided by the historian, while the second has a credibility claim, verified by its narrative coherence. At first, it seems evident that judicial narrative should be a form of historical narrative, because of the undeniable relationship between truth (as correspondence) and justice. Despite that, there are many indications, in legal practice, that correspondence is not always reached, not only because of a cognitive defect, but also because of a legal prohibition to access and evaluate the available data. It is justified, in part, by the thought that the Judicial System has other goals, besides truth-finding, but that can be phrased in a different way: when it is a case of abandonment of correspondence, other types of validity-claims (like normative correction or consensus) prevail over its search. So, it can be said that judicial narrative is fictional, but, since correspondence can’t be completely abandoned, it is fiction based on true facts. Judicial narrative’s structure is binary, divided in the trial story, told in the high mimetic mode, in which the conflict story, told in the low mimetic or the ironic mode, is gradually revealed, and the ending of the first is also the ending of the second. Regarding the narrators, the plurality of points of view is the most important aspect, which is a consequence of the system itself and destined to generate a provisional uncertainty about the truth, that the final decision will overcome. Recognizing each case file as a fictional universe means that coherence, and not correspondence, has to be adopted as the criterion of truth. On the other hand, since it is a true facts based fiction, correspondence can’t be completely abandoned, because coherence can be misleading. External coherence can be misleading when it evokes a familiar narrative, ingrained in the tradition, but that doesn’t reflect correctly the particular case. Internal coherence can be misleading when there is a false consensus between the parties, or a false confession by one of them; when a narrative is coherent by one measure and incoherent by another, the correction can come from a verification of this divergence and a decision for one of the criteria, but if a narrative is doubly coherent, but false, or doubly incoherent, but true, the narrative resources are insufficient to correct the problem.