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Informationen zum Autor Erin Sheley is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Her legal research considers how the law should account for subjectivity in measuring and punishing criminal and tort harm. Her work has appeared in such journals as the North Carolina Law Review , the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology , the Wake Forest Law Review , and the Indiana Law Review . Her literary scholarship has appeared in the Byron Journal , the Southern Literary Journal , Law and Literature , and Law, Culture and the Humanities . She holds an A.B. and J.D. from Harvard University and a PhD in English from the George Washington University. Klappentext A new framework for examining the relationship between individual and cultural trauma, literary texts and the cumulative 'truth' produced by the common lawThrough interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itself. It draws on 3 case studies - adultery, child criminality and rape testimony - that demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the 18th and 19th centuries.Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary 'construction' of childhood by 19th-century fairy-tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.Transformative readings of widely read works include:¿ Charles Brockden Brown's 'Wieland and Ormond'¿ Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles'¿ Charles Kingsley's 'The Water-Babies'¿ George MacDonald's 'The Lost Princess'¿ Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King'¿ Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre'¿ Henry Fielding's 'The Modern Husband'¿ Sir Walter Scott's 'Heart of Midlothian'¿ Samuel Richardson's 'Clarissa'Erin Sheley is Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law Zusammenfassung Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: The Tolbooth DoorPart I: Adultery as Actus Reus1. Adultery, Criminality, and the Myth of English Sovereignty2. The Gothic Law of MarriagePart II: Child Criminality as Mens Rea3. 'The Faerie Court' of Child PunishmentPart III: The Rape Victim as Evidence4. The Rape Novel and Reputation Evidence5. Literary Rape Trials and the Trauma of National IdentityCoda: Leaving MidlothianBibliography...