• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction

Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction

Paperback

Series: Discourses of Law

General Law

ISBN10: 1138606162
ISBN13: 9781138606166
Publisher: Routledge
Published: May 11 2018
Pages: 177
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

How do lawyers, judges and jurors read novels? And what is at stake when literature and law confront each other in the courtroom? Nineteenth-century England and France are remembered for their active legal prosecution of literature, and this book examines the ways in which five novels were interpreted in the courtroom: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Paul Bonnetain's Charlot s'amuse, Henry Vizetelly's English translation of Émile Zola's La Terre, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. It argues that each of these novels attracted legal censure because they presented figures of sexual dissidence - the androgyne, the onanist or masturbator, the patricide, the homosexual and the lesbian - that called into question an increasingly fragile normative, middleclass masculinity. Offering close readings of the novels themselves, and of legal material from the proceedings, such as the trial transcripts and judicial opinions, the book addresses both the doctrinal dimensions of Victorian obscenity and censorship, as well as the reading practices at work in the courtroom. It situates the cases in their historical context, and highlights how each trial constitutes a scene of reading - an encounter between literature and the law - through which different forms of masculinity were shaped, bolstered or challenged.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

General Law