Books in the Law and Literature series

A study of the concept of custom, the basis of England's common law, in literary experiments of sixteenth-century England and Ireland.

Exploring legal treatises, court decisions, political illustrations, photographs, and modernist literature, this volume reveals that the ambiguous status of corporate intention in the first half of the twentieth century provoked conflicting theories of meaning and interpretation still debated today.

Based on extensive archival work, Characters before Copyright shows that fan fiction proliferated in the eighteenth century and explains why this phenomenon emerged when it did.

This book describes how literature depicts imprisonment in a wealth of metaphors of confinement in literature from the late middle ages to the present day. As well as carceral metaphors the volume explores how notions of imprisonment extend to other situations such as jobs, marriage, and ideology.

Explores the history of legal theatricality from antiquity to the eighteenth-century. It recovers a long tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a form of theatre, a tradition that ancient, medieval, early modern, and later theorists transmitted across centuries, continually elaborating and reworking it to suit changing conditions.