Explores the pursuit of justice through the processes of writing, reading and interpreting in Enlightenment and Romantic-period literature
This provocative and timely volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the ‘age of revolutions’ from 1750 to 1850 – a period which was marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and to rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceived the fairness of a given legal order and worked with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of ‘epistemic injustice’ to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ and aid efforts to humanise the rule of law.
Arvustused
Exploring epistemic injustices and reforms, equity and normative standards, these essays reveal how Romantic-era literature conceptualized justice in ways that echo urgently with todays social dilemmas and literary-critical debates. -- Mark Schoenfield, Vanderbilt University
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Part I: Discerning Principles
Introduction to Part I: Discerning Principles, Michael Demson and Regina
Hewitt;
1. Law, Religion and Changing Ideas of Innocence in Romantic Literature,
Jan-Melissa Schramm
2. Adam Smith on Resentment and Retribution, Victoria Myers
3. Indianism and the Last Performance of Edmund Burke, Padma Rangarajan
4. The Trial of Queen Caroline: Radical Spectacle, Caricature and the Triumph
of Public Opinion in the Shadow of the Six Acts, Ian Haywood
5. Legal Vengeance and Popular Violence: Reimagining Justice in The Heart of
Midlothian, Melissa J. Ganz
Part II: Refining Standards
Introduction to Part II: Refining Standards, Michael Demson and Regina
Hewitt
6. Rehabilitating Jacobites in Romantic-Era Britain: The Cultural Memory of
the 1745 Rising in Thomas Campbells Lochiels Warning and Anne Grants
The Highlanders, Leith Davis
7. Jews Performing Remorse: The Trials and Tribulations of John Jew King
and His Daughters, Michael Scrivener
8. Fugitive Morality in Two Scots Poets: Robert Burns, Alexander Wilson and
the Law, Gerard Carruthers and Moira Hansen
9. The Past is Irrevocable: Justice, Punishment and Irish Romantic Writing,
James Kelly
10. Flogging Phelim: Christian Isobel Johnstone, the Perils of Injustice and
the Promise of Reform, Elizabeth Kraft
Part III: Affirming Resistances
Introduction to Part III: Affirming Resistances, Michael Demson and Regina
Hewitt
11. Reparatory Justice and the Afterlives of Slavery in Twenty-first-century
Creative Rememberings of Mary Prince, Sue Thomas
12. John Clare and Enclosure Again: Against Simplification, Timothy Clark
13. Prison Hulks in Romantic Seascapes, Michael Demson
Index
Michael Demson is Professor of English at Sam Houston State University. He coedited, with Christopher Clason, Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms (2020) and, with Regina Hewitt, Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-making during the Romantic Era (2019). He has published articles in European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Romantic Circles, The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, among others. His graphic novel, Masks of Anarchy: From Percy Shelley to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, was published in 2013. Regina Hewitt is Professor of English at the University of South Florida. Her most recent publications include Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making during the Romantic Era, co-edited with Michael Demson (2019), and an edition of Lawrie Todd for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt (2023). Formerly Co-Editor of the European Romantic Review, she now serves as a Consulting Editor for that journal.
