Subversion and Sympathy Gender, Law, and the British Novel

This interdisciplinary volume of contributed essays focuses on issues of gender in the British novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Hardy and Trollope. Approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds, the contributors reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement by displaying a range of ways in which literature and law can illuminate one another and in which the conversation between them can illuminate deeper human issues with which both disciplines areconcerned. Their chapters shed light on a range of gender-related issues, from inheritance to money-lending to illegitimacy, but also make an important methodological contribution by displaying (and discussing) a range of methodological perspectives that exemplify the breadth and range of thisdiscipline, which links history, gender studies, philosophy, literary studies, and law.

Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Alison LaCroix is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Introduction, Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum
Preface, Diane P. Wood
I. Marriage and Sex
The Moral and Legal Consequences of Wife-Selling in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Julie C. Suk
Jude the Obscure: The Irrelevance of Marriage Law, Amanda Claybaugh
The History of Obscenity, the British Novel, and the First Amendment, Geoffrey R. Stone
Jane Austen: Comedy and Social Structure, Richard A. Posner
II. Law, Social Norms, and Women's Agency
Pious Perjury in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, Julia Simon-Kerr
Rape, Seduction, Purity, and Shame in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Marcia Baron
The Stain of Illegitimacy: Gender, Law, and Trollopian Subversion, Martha C. Nussbaum
Could He Forgive Her? Gender, Agency, and Women's Criminality in the Novels of Anthony Trollope, Nicola Lacey
III. Property, Commerce, Travel
Law, Commerce, and Gender in Trollope's Framley Parsonage, Douglas G. Baird
Primogeniture, Legal Change, and Trollope, Saul Levmore
Defoe's Formal Laws, Bernadette Meyler
IV. Readers and Interpretation
The Lawyer's Library in the Early American Republic, Alison L. LaCroix
Proposals and Performative Utterance in the 19th-Century Novel: the Professional Man's Plight, Robert A. Ferguson
A Comeuppance Theory of Narrative and the Emotions, Blakey Vermeule