In this study, I examine literary fictions and legal fictions in selected texts of the modern period. In trying to make an interdisciplinary contribution to the field of literary study, I also draw on such diverse discourses as the history and sociology of law as well as contemporary cultural anthropology. My main goal is to discuss the relationship between the marginal, the equitable, and the unparalleled as one way of tackling the question of ethics in contemporary literary study. Narrowing the scope of this question, I focus on how, during the modern period, the equitable force of conscience informed the languages of sentiment, philanthropy, and solidarity. Essentially, I argue that this branching out generated complex literary responses to a gradual disjunction of equitable justice and critical reason.

For the purpose of this argument, I single out two specific legal fictions, Civil Death and Substituted Judgment. They are both striking metaphors of marginalization and divining rods for the nexus of law and literature in modern England. In the light of Bentham's critique of legal fictions, I reread different cross-overs between literary fictions and legal fictions in the canonical authors Sterne, Dickens, and Conrad. These cross-overs indicate how literature's marginal impact on dominant notions of equitable justice supplemented a significant number of common-law practices.

Sentimentality, utility, philanthropy, and solidarity can be considered nonlegal rhetorical institutions of equitable justice.