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In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White Jacket, Pierre and "Bartleby" (worker exploitation or wage slavery), The Confidence-Man (contracts), and finally, "Billy Budd," which examines a number of issues illustrative of the triumph of legal formalism after the Civil War.
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Cross-examinations of law and literature Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory Board N I N A BAYM, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana SACVAN BERCOVITCH, Harvard University DAVID LEVIN, University of Virginia JOEL PORTE, Cornell University ERIC S U N D Q U I S T , University of California, Los Angeles T O N Y TANNER, Cambridge University MIKE WEAVER, Oxford University Other books in the series: Ronald Bush (ed.), T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction Timothy Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism Ezra Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader Michael Oriard, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture Stephen Fredman, Poet's Prose: The Crisis of American Verse, Second edition David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Susan K. Harris, 19th-century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies Susan Manning, The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century Richard Godden, Fictions of Capital: Essays on the American Novel from James to Mailer John Limon, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature Charles Altieri, Jr., Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism John P. MeWilliams, The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770-1860 Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century Eric Sigg, The American T.S. Eliot Roberts S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the Woman Business' Tony Tanner, Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men Cross-examinations of law and literature Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville BROOK THOMAS University of Massachusetts at Amherst r/r* rifAi af the University of Cambridge to print and sett all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534 The University has printed and published continuously since 1584 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE NEW YORK PORT CHESTER MELBOURNE SYDNEY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521330817 © Cambridge University Press 1987 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permissio