The Judicial Imagination Writing After Nuremberg

Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after NurembergReturning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces a critical aesthetics of judgment in a generation of writers including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. Bringing together literary-legal theory with trauma studies, The Judicial Imagination, argues that today we have much to learn from these writers' impassioned scepticism about the law's ability to legislate for the territorial violence of our times.Key Features* Returns to the work of Hannah Arendt as the starting point for a new theorisation of the relation between law and trauma* Provides a new context for understanding the continuities between late modernism and postwar writing through a focus on justice and human rights* Offers a model of reading between history, law and literature which focuses on how matters of style and genre articulate moral, philosophical and political ambiguities and perplexities* Makes a significant contribution to the rapidly developing fields of literary-legal and human rights studies

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Introduction
Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
Part One: Writing After Nuremberg
Chapter One: 'An event that did not become an experience': Rebecca West's Nuremberg
Chapter Two: The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt's Irony
Chapter Three: Fiction in Jerusalem: Muriel Spark's Idiom of Judgement
Part Two: Territorial Rights
Chapter Four: 'We Refugees': Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
Chapter Five: 'Creatures of an Impossible Time': Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
Chapter Six: The Dark Background of Difference: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch

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