Reconstituting authority
Subtitle: American fiction in the province of the law, 1880-1920
By: William E. Moddelmog.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Iowa City
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
Subjects: Legal stories, American -- History and criticism; American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Law and literature -- History -- 19th century; Law and literature -- History -- 20th century; Authority in literature; Law in literature
Description: "In Reconstituting Authority, William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority.".

"Moddelmog does not assume a sharp distinction between literary and legal institutions and practices but shows how writers imagined the two fields as engaged in the same cultural process.

He argues that because the law was instrumental in setting the terms by which concepts such as race, gender, nationhood, ownership, and citizenship were defined in the nineteenth century, authors challenging those definitions had to engage the law on its own terrain: to place their work in a dialogue with the law by telling stories that were already authorized (though perhaps suppressed) by legal institutions."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-268) and index.